by
Ellen Ullman
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As I made my way to my cubicle, I had one of the startled, queasy moments that sometimes came over me during my first years at Telligentsia. It was a feeling of displacement, the sense that I had landed in the middle of a newly forming planet where the laws of evolution were suddenly changed and unrecognizable. What was I doing surrounded by compulsive punners? By programmers who spent their time working in the cramped, stripped-down language of code? All around me, nothing but artificial languages: UNIX shell scripts and C programs and database queries asked in Structure Query Language—“impoverished languages” was the term I introduced to my students when I was a graduate teaching assistant. Artificial languages as poor human inventions stripped of history, usage, experience, connotation. All the dripping suggestiveness of language—gone. Around me an entirely new world was coming into being, and it was being made out of artificial, impoverished languages.
Oh, I should give it up, I knew. I was stuck in a nineteenth-century idea of the Real and the True, which I should confine to my journal writing and poetry scribbling. There I could indulge my tiresome need for the Essential and the Transcendent—for all those philosophical German words that began with capital letters—without bothering too many people about them. I’d been a student of James McCawley, the linguist who insisted on the study of meaning, not just syntax and structure. It had ruined my academic career, according to my dissertation advisor. “The future is in computational linguistics,” he’d insisted, by which he’d meant the math of words, the formalism of language, the deduction of elemental parts of speech, like atom-splitting. When done well, the advisor insisted, computational linguistics would eventually eliminate the difference between natural and artificial language. You won’t know if you’re talking to a human being or a program, and you won’t care. “You should go into computer speech-recognition research,” the advisor had advised.
I sat and gazed back at him as his yes-nods slowly came to a halt. Was that the purpose of those nods: to tell you how you must answer? For I saw there was no other reply I could make. I was supposed to say, Yes, I was done with it. That everything I’d cared about for the last ten years was a hopeless dead end. All those articles neatly listed on my résumé, all the talks at conferences, all the colloquia and symposia and everything else with Greek plural endings—over. The years I hung in there teaching the same course over and over, just to stay inside my profession somehow—why all that meant nothing, I was supposed to say, I was such a fool, what a waste. What was more, I was supposed to be grateful for the chance to leave it all behind, for a new start, even at the bottom.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m done. I suppose I’ve said everything I had to say on the subject anyway.” Then I laughed without meaning to. “You know, the world hasn’t exactly stopped in its tracks to listen to me.”
“When you’ve come from academia, every single thing here seems odd,” Wallis said. “Which particular type of ‘odd’ are you referring to?”
“How he wanted me to disown what I studied.”
“Oh, yes,” Wallis said. “The same thing happened to me at my first job. ‘Did your fieldwork in Borneo? Not much computing there, dear!’”
I should have left it there. It might have been more pleasant for me. “Still,” I said, “it was weird. I felt like he somehow wanted me to give up my Ph.D. To renounce it.”
Wallis slid the job offer across the table.
I put my hand on the paper, still warm from the laser printer. Stock options, sick leave, vacation, more money in a year than I’d ever earned in four. At the bottom was Wallis’s neat signature, and a blank line waiting for mine.
“Well,” she said, extending a pen, a fat black fountain pen, its gold point shining in the light. “Isn’t that rather what you’re about to do?”
It happened while I was in the middle of an argument with Bradley Thorne. I had come across a bug of his, some anomalous behavior in a window, nothing major, a level-three. “It’s not my bug! Not my bug!” he was shouting. “It says right here it is!” I responded, holding up the printout of the code. “Created by Bradley Thorne,” I read from the header. “Last mod Bradley Thorne.” He squinted at the listing. Mara Margolies was his primary tester, and I had watched her go through this countless times with him: his terrifying forgetfulness, as if he had never before laid eyes upon this code. Thorne was famous for his “code production,” lines of code written by the thousands, a prowess he had apparently achieved by not much bothering to remember what he’d typed. “This code can’t possibly be responsible for that window!” he was shouting. “It says right on the header it is!” I was shouting back. [...]
Debugging: what an odd word. As if “bugging” were the job of putting in bugs, and debugging the task of removing them. But no. The job of putting in bugs is called programming. A programmer writes some code and inevitably makes the mistakes that result in the malfunctions called bugs. Then, for some period of time, normally longer than the time it takes to design and write the code in the first place, the programmer tries to remove the mistakes. One by one: find a bug, fix it. Bug: supposedly named for an actual moth that found its way into an early computer, an insect invader attracted to the light of glowing vacuum tubes, a moth that flapped about in the circuitry and brought down a machine. But the term surely has an older, deeper origin. Fly in the ointment, shoo fly, bug-infested, bug-ridden, buggin’ out, don’t bug me—the whole human uneasiness with the vast, separate branch of evolution that produced the teeming creatures who outnumber us, plague us, and will likely survive our disappearance from the earth. Their mindless success humbles us. A parallel universe without reason. From the Welsh: a hobgoblin, a specter.
lol
I never actually made the decision to stop working. For a year after my meeting with the idiot, I told people I was “between contracts.” Then, over the next year, the state of between-ness somehow became permanent. I did volunteer work for a group that helps nonprofits with computing problems, but gradually a sort of miasmatic depression took me over, a dreary kind of fog in which it became harder and harder to do anything at all. When you’re working and hurrying to the laundry before it closes, it seems that having all the time in the world will be glorious. But then, suddenly without the structures of a job, why get up at any particular hour? Why get to sleep? It takes great internal discipline, I found, to make up each and every day for yourself. I began to tumble around in time. I went to movies in the morning. I drank in the afternoon. I began going out to dinner with friends every night. There are three or four very good restaurants in town that have come to consider me a regular. No longer having an office to go to, no place to offer the sort of formal friendliness business acquaintances give you, I found in these restaurants a substitute impersonal solace: the welcome at the reception stand, the satisfaction of being seated ahead of everyone with reservations, being treated as if I’d come home. It’s possible that those places have indeed become what I can count on as home.
Whatever guilt I felt at my extended idleness (which was considerable; my mother worked until the last months of her life) was tempered by the admiration I received from the new paper millionaires the Internet boom was creating by the thousands all around me. Young people I met admired me—though they found me a bit slow, retired as I am at forty-eight, not thirty-three. It did no good to remind them that the companies I’d worked for had had to show a profit before they could even think of going public, two consecutive quarters in a row, actual revenues in excess of costs. It seemed so quaint to them, passé, the notion of having a product, paying customers, profits. They believed the public markets should finance their fantasies. “What is your business plan for revenues?” I asked a young man I met at a party who had founded a start-up. “Go IPO!” he said.
That could have been Ethan Levin, I think, as I watch the man’s nervous swipes at his hair and remember the whole story again, like it or not. Ethan had eight times the stock options I did. He wouldn’t have had to work for the next six start-ups, wouldn’t have had to do consulting. He’d be long retired by now, well into his own life of compensated idleness. He would have traveled the world, would have sat in business-class lounges everywhere, drinking a complimentary alcoholic beverage as he watched his fortune melt away. Money as transient as electrons. Wealth as weightless as data broadcast through the air, rising and falling in currents like weather, beyond anyone’s control. Yes, that’s how it should have happened: Ethan Levin was supposed to be rich like me.
His flight was early. I had to race downstairs to meet him.
“Shitty flight” was how he greeted me. “Where’s the car?”
There are some disappointments you simply can’t let yourself feel right at the moment. There were obstacles to negotiate, after all—the luggage cart to be gotten through elevators and onto ramps, the car to be found, the Bay Bridge to be crossed—and how could I have attended to them if I’d given in to the feeling that was pulling me? An actual sort of sickness is what it felt like, an invader in my chest, some rogue organism hurtling around in me. Then anger: a flash of bitter anger.