Finally, at about 2:30A.M., Todd and I got concerned about Michael’s not eating, so we drove to the 24-hour Safeway in Redmond. We went shopping for “flat” foods to slip underneath Michael’s door.

[...]

Michael’s office lights were on, but once again, when we knocked, he wouldn’t answer his door. We heard his keyboard chatter, so we figured he was still alive. The situation really begged a discussion of Turing logic—could we have discerned that the entity behind the door was indeed even human? We slid Kraft singles, Premium Plus crackers, Pop-Tarts, grape leather, and Freezie-Pops in to him.

Susan’s stock vests later this week, and she’s going to have a vesting party. And then she’s going to quit. Larger social forces are at work, threatening to dissolve our group house.

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.

Abe is sort of like the household Monopoly-game banker. He collects our monthly checks for the landlord, $235 apiece. The man has millions and he rents! He’s been at the group house since 1984, when he was hired fresh out of MIT. (The rest of us have been here, on average about eight months apiece.) After ten years of writing code, Abe so far shows no signs of getting a life. He seems happy to be reaching the age of 30 in just four months with nothing to his name but a variety of neat-o consumer electronics and boxes of Costco products purchased in rash moments of Costco-scale madness (“Ten thousand straws! Just think of it—only $10 and I’ll never need to buy straws ever again!”) These products line the walls of his room, giving it the feel of an air-raid shelter.

Bonus detail: There are dried-out patches of sneeze spray all over Abe’s monitors. You’d think he could afford 24 bottles of Windex.

Todd works as a tester with me. He’s really young—22—the way Microsoft employees all used to be. His interest is entirely in girls, bug testing, his Supra, and his body, which he buffs religiously at the Pro Club gym and feeds with peanut butter quesadillas, bananas, and protein drinks.

Todd is historically empty. He neither knows nor cares about the past. He reads Car and Driver and fields three phone calls a week from his parents who believe that computers are “the Devil’s voice box,” and who try to persuade him to return home to Port Angeles and speak with the youth pastor.

They’re also the first generation of Microsoft employees faced with reduced stock options and, for that matter, plateauing stock prices. I guess that makes them mere employees, just like at any other company. Bug Barbecue and I were wondering last week what’s going to happen when this new crop of workers reaches its inevitable Seven-Year Programmer’s Burnout. At the end of it they won’t have two million dollars to move to Hilo and start up a bait shop with, the way the Microsoft old-timers did. Not everyone can move into management.

It turns out Abe has entrepreneurial aspirations. We had dinner in the downstairs cafeteria together (Indonesian Bamay with frozen yogurt and double espresso). He’s thinking of quitting and becoming a pixelation broker—going around to museums and buying the right to digitize their paintings. It’s a very “Rich Microsoft” thing to do. Microsoft’s millionaires are the first generation of North American nerd wealth.

Once Microsofters’ ships come in, they travel all over: Scotland and Patagonia and Thailand … Condé Nast Traveler-ish places. They buy Shaker furniture, Saabs, koi, Pilchuck glass, native art, and 401(k)s to the max. The ultrarichies build fantasy homes on the Sammammish Plateau loaded with electronic toys.

It’s all low-key spending, mostly, and fresh and fun. Nobody’s buying crypts, I notice—though when the time comes that they do, said crypts will no doubt be emerald and purple colored, and lined with Velcro and Gore-Tex.

Abe, like most people here, is a fiscal Republican, but otherwise, pretty empty-file in the ideology department. Vesting turns most people into fiscal Republicans, I’ve noticed.

The rain broke around 3:00 and I walked around the Campus feeling miserable. I looked at all the cars parked in the lot and got exhausted just thinking about all the energy that must have gone into these people choosing just the right car. And I also noticed something Twilight-Zoney about all the cars on Campus: None of them have bumper stickers, as though everyone is censoring themselves. I guess this indicates a fear of something.

All these little fears: fear of not producing enough; fear of not finding a little white-with-red-printing stock option envelope in the pigeonhole; fear of losing the sensation of actually making something anymore; fear about the slow erosion of perks within the company; fear that the growth years will never return again; fear that the bottom line is the only thing that really drives the process; fear of disposability … God, listen to me. What a downer. But sometimes I think it would be so much easier to be jerking espressos in Lynwood, leaving the Tupperware-sealed, Biosphere 2-like atmosphere of Microsoft behind me.

I got to thinking of my own Lego superstitions. “When I was young, if I built a house out of Lego, the house had to be all in one color. I used to play Lego with Ian Ball who lived up the street, back in Bellingham. He used to make his house out of whatever color brick he happened to grab. Can you imagine the sort of code someone like that would write?”

“I used to build with mixed colors …” said Bug.

“What do I know?” I said, pulling my foot out of it.

Abe, however, is saying no. “What—you guys want to leave a sure thing?” he keeps asking us. “You think Microsoft’s going to shrink, or are you nuts?”

“That’s not the point, Abe.”

“What is the point, then?”

“One-Point-Oh,” I said.

“What?” replied Abe.

“Being One-Point-Oh. The first to do something cool or new.”

“And so in order to be ‘One-Point-Oh’ you’d forfeit all of this—” (Abe fumbles for le mot juste, and expands arms widely to showcase a filthy living room covered with Domino’s boxes, junk mail solicitations, Apple hard hats, three Federal Express baseball caps, and Nerf Gatling guns) “—security? How do you know you’re not just trading places … coding like fuck every day except with a palm tree outside the window instead of a cedar?”