My life as a Microserf

Those of us who adored Douglas Coupland's "Microserfs" will be glad to know he has a sequel coming out next year, jPod, in which the Microserfs are now working for game company Electronic Arts (see my Sims post below).

Coupland's official site has the book cover and some typical Coupland randomness that will no doubt make a tiny bit more sense in the context of the book. And if you scroll down on this page, you get a few more jPod tidbits from the man himself.

If you haven't read "Microserfs," I really can't recommend it highly enough. It's about a group of co-workers and friends who work at Microsoft in the early to mid-90s (the book came out in 1995). You get a taste of the crazy geek coder lifestyle -- it opens with one friend being flamed by Bill Gates, as I recall, and there's a great scene where they make a pilgrimage to Costco to buy flat foods to shove under the guy's office door when he refuses to come out. But even if you've never turned on a computer, you'll appreciate the family story, how the co-workers become each other's family, and the real-life parents of one are drawn into the circle of friends when a health crisis occurs.

It's warm and funny and when I first read it, I wanted nothing more than to work at Microsoft, at least at Microsoft as described in the book. The workers sounded more like college buddies than what I thought of as adult employees of a company. They worked together, sure, but they also left the office at random times during the day to shop and wander, they played pranks on each other at work and outside work. They were exceptionally smart, but with that fine veneer of geekiness that I've always found endearing -- the kind of arguments you have in college about this movie or that TV show or that bit of "Star Trek" trivia were absolutely welcome in their lives. I thought that the perfect job would be to live in Seattle and work at Microsoft. This was 1995. I had never lived outside of Minnesota and couldn't code to save my life. It was just a book, a nice daydream of how my life might have been in a different world.

Fast-forward one year. In the last month of 1996, through a crazy chain of coincidences, I (me! a journalist who didn't know HTTP from PHP!) got a job offer from Microsoft, to work as restaurant editor for the brand-new Twin Cities Sidewalk. I didn't move to Seattle -- not yet -- but my paychecks came from Microsoft. That job ended in 1999, and by then Rob was also working for Microsoft -- in his case, Microsoft Consulting in Minneapolis. By 2001, we'd decided we were going to try for the West Coast, and that August, we were both offered jobs in Seattle, he with Microsoft proper, me with MSNBC. We drove out to Seattle in late September and started living our own "Microserfs" lifestyle, such that it is.

And about once a week now, I walk down the halls of Microsoft's main campus and have to laugh out loud. The latest was when they were painting offices in my building. Someone who'd gone on vacation had taped a sign to their door "Do NOT paint this office." The sign had turned into a kind of floorwide bulletin board -- first someone wrote on it "But why? We need to know!", and the comments went on from there, in different colored pens, different scribbled handwriting, but all with the flavor of comments on a college dormroom whiteboard, not an office.

Somehow I realized that, 10 years after reading "Microserfs," it has become my life.