Microserfs Read Free Page A

consideration. He's also the only roomie to have clean laundry consistently. In a crunch you can always borrow an unsoiled shirt from Todd.
    * * *
    Bug Barbecue's seven Jeopardy! categories would be:
    • Bitterness
    • Xerox PARC nostalgia
    • Macintosh products
    • More bitterness
    • Psychotic loser friends
    • Jazz
    • Still more bitterness
    * * *
    Bug Barbecue is the World's Most Bitter Man. He is (as his name implies) a tester with me at Building Seven. His have-a-life factor is pretty near zero. He has the smallest, darkest room in the house, in which he maintains two small shrines: one to his Sinclair ZX-81, his first computer, and the other to supermodel Elle MacPherson. Man, she'd freak if she saw the hundreds of little photos - the coins, the candles, the little notes.
    Bug is 31, and he lets everyone know it. If we ever ask him so much as "Hey, Bug - have you seen volume 7 of my Inside Mac?" he gives a sneer and replies, "You're obviously of the generation that never built their own motherboard or had to invent their own language."
    Hey, Bug - we love you, too.
    Bug never gets offered stock by the company. When payday comes and the little white stock option envelopes with red printing reading "Personal and Confidential" end up in all of our pigeonholes, Bug's is always, alas, empty. Maybe they're trying to get rid of him, but it's almost impossible to fire someone at Microsoft. It must drive the administration nuts. They hired 3,100 people in 1992 alone, and you know not all of them were gems.
    Oddly, Bug is fanatical in his devotion to Microsoft. It's as if the more they ignore him, the more rabidly he defends their honor. And if you cherish your own personal time, you will not get into a discussion with him over the famous Look-&-Feel lawsuit or any of the FTC or Department of Justice actions:
    "These litigious pricks piss me off. I wish they'd compete in the marketplace where it really counts instead of being little wusses and whining for government assistance to compete. . . ."
    You've been warned.
    * * *
    Finally, Michael. Michael's seven Jeopardy! categories would be:
    • FORTRAN
    • Pascal
    • Ada (defense contracting code)
    •LISP
    • Neil Peart (drummer for Rush)
    • Hugo and Nebula award winners
    • Sir Lancelot
    * * *
    Michael is probably the closest I'll ever come to knowing someone who lives in a mystical state. He lives to assemble elegant streams of code instructions. He's like Mozart to everyone else's Salieri - he enters people's offices where lines of code are written on the dry-erase whiteboards and quietly optimizes the code as he speaks to them, as though someone had written wrong instructions on how to get to the beach and he was merely setting them right so they wouldn't get lost.
    He often uses low-tech solutions to high-tech problems: Popsicle sticks, rubber bands, and little strips of paper that turn on a bent coat hanger frame help him solve complex matrix problems. When he moved offices into his new window office (good coder, good office), he had to put Post-it notes reading "Not Art" on his devices so that the movers didn't stick them under the glass display cases out in the central atrium area.
    SUNDAY
    This morning before heading to the office I read an in-depth story about Burt and Loni's divorce in People magazine. Thus, 1,474,819 brain cells that could have been used toward a formula for world peace were obliterated. Are computer memory and human memory analogous? Michael would know.
    * * *
    Mid-morning, I mountain-hiked over to Nintendo headquarters, across Interstate 520 from Microsoft.
    Now, I've never been to the South African plant of, say, Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, but I bet it looks a lot like Nintendo headquarters - two-story industrial-plex buildings sheathed with Death Star-black windows and landscape trees around the parking lot seemingly clicked into place with a mouse. It's nearly identical to Microsoft except Microsoft uses sea foam-green glass on its