Microserfs

• Three IKEA mugs encrusted with last month's blender drink sensation

• Two 12.5-pound dumbbells (Susan's)

• A Windows NT box

• Three baseball caps (two Mariners, one A's)

• Abe's Battlestar Galactica trading card album

• Todd's pile of books on how to change your life to win! (Getting Past OK, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People . . .)

The kitchen is stocked with ramshackle 1970s avocado green appliances. You can almost hear the ghost of Emily Hartley yelling "Hi, Bob!" every time you open the fridge door (a sea of magnets and 4-x-6-inch photos of last year's house parties).

Our mail is in little piles by the front door: bills, Star Trek junk mail, and the heap-o-catalogues next to the phone.

I think we'd order our lives via 1-800 numbers if we could.

* * *

Mom phoned from Palo Alto. This is the time of year she calls a lot. She calls because she wants to speak about Jed, but none of us in the family are able. We kind of erased him.

I used to have a younger brother named Jed. He drowned in a boating accident in the Strait of Juan de Fuca when I was 14 and he was 12. A Labor Day statistic.

To this day, anything Labor Day-ish creeps me out: the smell of barbecuing salmon, life preservers, Interstate traffic reports from the local radio Traffic Copter, Monday holidays. But here's a secret: My e-mail password is hellojed. So I think about him every day. He was way better with computers than I was. He was way nerdier than me.

* * *

As it turned out, Mom had good news today. Dad has a big meeting Monday with his company. Mom and Dad figure it's a promotion because Dad's IBM division has been doing so well (by IBM standards - it's not hemorrhaging money). She says she'll keep me posted.

* * *

Susan taped laser-printed notes on all of our bedroom doors reminding us about the vesting party this Thursday ("Vest Fest '93"), which was a subliminal hint to us to clean up the place. Most of us work in Building Seven; shipping hell has brought a severe breakdown in cleanup codes.

* * *

Susan is 26 and works in Mac Applications. If Susan were a Jeopardy! contestant, her dream board would be:

• 680X0 assembly language

• Cats

• Early '80s haircut bands

• "My secret affair with Rob in the Excel Group"

• License plate slogans of America

• Plot lines from The Monkees

•The death of IBM

* * *

Susan's an IBM brat and hates that company with a passion. She credits it with ruining her youth by transferring her family eight times before she graduated from high school - and the punchline is that the company gave her father the boot last year during a wave of restructuring. So nothing too evil can happen to IBM in her eyes. Her graphic designer friend made up T-shirts saying "IBM: Weak as a Kitten, Dumb as a Sack of Hammers." We all wear them. I gave one to Dad last Christmas but his reaction didn't score too high on the chuckle-o-meter. (I am not an IBM brat - Dad was teaching at the University of Western Washington until the siren of industry lured him to Palo Alto in 1985. It was very '80s.)

Susan's a real coding machine. But her abilities are totally wasted reworking old code for something like the Norwegian Macintosh version of Word 5.8. Susan's work ethic best sums up the ethic of most of the people I've met who work at Microsoft. If I recall her philosophy from the conversation she had with her younger sister two weekends ago, it goes something like this:

"It's never been, 'We're doing this for the good of society.' It's always been us taking an intellectual pride in putting out a good product - and making money. If putting a computer on every desktop and in every home didn't make money, we wouldn't do it."

That sums up most of the Microsoft people I know.

* * *

Microsoft, like any office, is a status theme park. Here's a quick rundown:

• Profitable projects are galactically higher in status than loser (not quite as profitable) projects.

• Microsoft at Work (Digital Office) is sexiest at the moment. Fortune 500 companies are drooling over DO because it'll allow them to downsize

millions of employees. Basically, DO allows you to operate your fax, phone, copier - all of your office stuff - from your PC.

• Cash cows like Word are profitable but not really considered cutting

edge.

• Working on-Campus is higher status than being relegated to one of the off-Campus Siberias.

• Having Pentium-driven hardware (built to the hilt) in your office is higher status than having 486 droneware.

• Having technical knowledge is way up there.

• Being an architect is also way up there.

• Having Bill-o-centric contacts is way, way up there.

• Shipping your product on time is maybe the coolest (insert wave of anxiety here). If you ship on time you get a Ship-It award: a 12-x-15-x-l-inch Lucite slab - but you have to pretend it's no big deal. Michael has a Ship-It award and we've tried various times to destroy it - blowtorching, throwing it off the verandah, dousing it with acetone to dissolve it - nothing works. It's so permanent, it's frightening.

* * *

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