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Microserfs Paperback – November 11, 2008
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They are Microserfs—six code-crunching computer whizzes who spend upward of sixteen hours a day "coding" and eating "flat" foods (food which, like Kraft singles, can be passed underneath closed doors) as they fearfully scan company e-mail to learn whether the great Bill is going to "flame" one of them. But now there's a chance to become innovators instead of cogs in the gargantuan Microsoft machine. The intrepid Microserfs are striking out on their own—living together in a shared digital flophouse as they desperately try to cultivate well-rounded lives and find love amid the dislocated, subhuman whir and buzz of their computer-driven world.
- Print length400 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarper Perennial
- Publication dateNovember 11, 2008
- Dimensions5.31 x 0.9 x 8 inches
- ISBN-100061624268
- ISBN-13978-0061624261
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Coupland continues to register the buzz of his generation with fidelity.” — Jay McInerney, New York Times Book Review
“The novel’s real fun is the frequent and rapidly fired pop-culture references that span the 70s, 80s and 90s...and Coupland uses them with relish.” — Entertainment Weekly
About the Author
Douglas Coupland is the author of twelve novels, including Generation X and Microserfs, and several works of nonfiction, including Polaroids from the Dead. He lives and works in Vancouver, Canada.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Microserfs
A NovelBy Douglas CouplandHarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2008 Douglas CouplandAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780061624261
Chapter One
Microserfs Early Fall, 1993
This morning, just after 11:00, Michael locked himself in his office and he won't come out.
Bill (Bill!) sent Michael this totally wicked flame-mail from hell on the e-mail system—and he just whaled on a chunk of code Michael had written. Using the Bloom County-cartoons-taped-on-the-door index, Michael is certainly the most sensitive coder in Building Seven—not the type to take criticism easily. Exactly why Bill would choose Michael of all people to whale on is confusing.
We figured it must have been a random quality check to keep the troops in line. Bill's so smart.
Bill is wise.
Bill is kind.
Bill is benevolent.
Bill, Be My Friend . . . Please!
Actually, nobody on our floor has ever been flamed by Bill personally. The episode was tinged with glamour and we were somewhat jealous. I tried to tell Michael this, but he was crushed.
Shortly before lunch he stood like a lump outside my office. His skin was pale like rising bread dough, and his Toppy's cut was dripping sweat, leaving little damp marks on the oyster-gray-with-plum highlights of the Microsoft carpeting. He handed me a printout of Bill's memo and then gallumphed into his office, where he's been burrowed ever since.
He won't answer his phone, respond to e-mail, or open his door. On his doorknob he placed a "Do Not Disturb" thingy stolen from the Boston Radisson during last year's Macworld Expo. Todd and I walked out onto the side lawn to try to peek in his window, but his venetian blinds were closed and a gardener with a leaf blower chased us away with a spray of grass clippings.
They mow the lawn every ten minutes at Microsoft. It looks like green Lego pads.
Finally, at about 2:30 a.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.
The Safeway was completely empty save for us and a few other Microsoft people just like us—hair-trigger geeks in pursuit of just the right snack. Because of all the rich nerds living around here, Redmond and Bellevue are very "on-demand" neighborhoods. Nerds get what they want when they want it, and they go psycho if it's not immediately available. Nerds overfocus. I guess that's the problem. But it's precisely this ability to narrow-focus that makes them so good at code writing: one line at a time, one line in a strand of millions.
When we returned to Building Seven at 3:00 a.m., there were still a few people grinding away. Our group is scheduled to ship product (RTM: Release to Manufacturing) in just eleven days (Top Secret: We'll never make it).
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.
Todd asked me, "Do you think any of this violates geek dietary laws?"
Just then, Karla in the office across the hall screamed and then glared out at us from her doorway. Her eyes were all red and sore behind her round glasses. She said, "You guys are only encouraging him," like we were feeding a raccoon or something. I don't think Karla ever sleeps.
She harrumphed and slammed her door closed. Doors sure are important to nerds.
Anyway, by this point Todd and I were both really tired. We drove back to the house to crash, each in our separate cars, through the Campus grounds—22 buildings' worth of nerd-cosseting fun—cloistered by 100-foot-tall second growth timber, its streets quiet as the womb: the foundry of our culture's deepest dreams.
There was mist floating on the ground above the soccer fields outside the central buildings. I thought about the e-mail and Bill and all of that, and I had this weird feeling—of how the presence of Bill floats about the Campus, semi-visible, at all times, kind of like the dead grandfather in the Family Circus cartoons. Bill is a moral force, a spectral force, a force that shapes, a force that molds. A force with thick, thick glasses.
I am danielu@microsoft.com. If my life was a game of Jeopardy! my seven dream categories would be:
- Tandy products
- Trash TV of the late '70s and early '80s
- The history of Apple
- Career anxieties
- Tabloids
- Plant life of the Pacific Northwest
- Jell-O 1-2-3
I am a tester—a bug checker in Building Seven. I worked my way up the ladder from Product Support Services (PSS) where I spent six months in phone purgatory in 1991 helping little old ladies format their Christmas mailing lists on Microsoft Works.
Like most Microsoft employees, I consider myself too well adjusted to be working here, even though I am 26 and my universe consists of home, Microsoft, and Costco.
I am originally from Bellingham, up just near the border, but my parents live in Palo Alto now. I live in a group house with five other Microsoft employees: Todd, Susan, Bug Barbecue, Michael, and Abe.
We call ourselves "The Channel Three News Team."
I am single. I think partly this is because Microsoft is not conducive to relationships. Last year down at the Apple Worldwide Developer's Conference in San Jose, I met a girl who works not too far away, at Hewlett-Packard on Interstate 90, but it never went anywhere. Sometimes I'll sort of get something going, but then work takes over my life and I bail out of all my commitments and things fizzle.
Lately I've been unable to sleep. That's why I've begun writing this journal late at night, to try to see the patterns in my life. From this I hope to establish what my problem is—and then, hopefully, solve it. I'm trying to feel more well adjusted than I really am, which is, I guess, the human condition. My life is lived day to day, one line of bug-free code at a time.
The house:
Growing up, I used to build split-level ranch-type homes out of Legos. This is pretty much the house I live in now, but its ambiance is anything but sterilized Lego-clean. It was built about twenty years ago, maybe before Microsoft was even in the dream stage and this part of Redmond had a lost, alpine ski-cabin feel.
Instead of a green plastic pad with little plastic nubblies, our house sits on a thickly-treed lot beside a park on a cul-de-sac at the top of a steep hill. It's only a seven-minute drive from Campus. There are two other Microsoft group houses just down the hill. Karla, actually, lives in the house three down from us across the street.
People end up living in group houses either by e-mail or by word of mouth. Living in a group house is a little bit like admitting you're deficient in the having-a-life department, but at work you spend your entire life crunching code and testing for bugs, and what else are you supposed to do? Work, sleep, work, sleep, work, sleep. I know a few Microsoft employees who try to fake having a life—many a Redmond garage contains a never-used kayak collecting dust. You ask these people what they do in their spare time and they say, "Uhhh—kayaking. That's right. I kayak in my spare time." You can tell they're faking it.
I don't even do many sports anymore and my relationship with my body has gone all weird. I used to play soccer three times a week and now I feel like a boss in charge of an underachiever. I feel like my body is a station wagon in which I drive my brain around, like a suburban mother taking the kids to hockey practice.
The house is covered with dark cedar paneling. Out front there's a tiny patch of lawn covered in miniature yellow crop circles thanks to the dietary excesses of our neighbor's German shepherd, Mishka. Bug Barbecue keeps his weather experiments—funnels and litmus strips and so forth—nailed to the wall beside the front door. A flat of purple petunias long-expired from neglect—Susan's one attempt at prettification—depresses us every time we leave for work in the morning, resting as it does in the thin strip of soil between the driveway and Mishka's crop circles.
Abe, our in-house multimillionaire, used to have tinfoil all over his bedroom windows to keep out what few rays of sun penetrated the trees until we ragged on him so hard that he went out and bought a sheaf of black construction paper at the Pay N Pak and taped it up instead. It looked like a drifter lived here. Todd's only contribution to the house's outer appearance is a collection of car-washing toys sometimes visible beside the garage door. The only evidence of my being in the house is my 1977 AMC Hornet Sportabout hatchback parked out front when I'm home. It's bright orange, it's rusty, and damnit, it's ugly.
Continues...
Excerpted from Microserfsby Douglas Coupland Copyright © 2008 by Douglas Coupland. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
- Jell-O 1-2-3
- Plant life of the Pacific Northwest
- Tabloids
- Career anxieties
- The history of Apple
- Trash TV of the late '70s and early '80s
Product details
- Publisher : Harper Perennial (November 11, 2008)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 400 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0061624268
- ISBN-13 : 978-0061624261
- Item Weight : 11.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.31 x 0.9 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #972,938 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #11,828 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #18,301 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
- #45,851 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Since 1991 Coupland has written thirteen novels published in most languages. He has written and performed for England’s Royal Shakespeare Company and is a columnist for The Financial Times of London. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, e-flux, DIS and Vice. In 2000 Coupland amplified his visual art production and has recently had two separate museum retrospectives, Everything is Anything is Anywhere is Everywhere at the Vancouver Art Gallery, The Royal Ontario Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, and Bit Rot at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, and Villa Stücke in Munich this fall. In 2015 and 2016 Coupland was artist in residence in the Paris Google Cultural Institute. Coupland is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy, an Officer of the Order of Canada, a Officer of the Order of British Columbia and is a Chevlier de l'Order des Arts et des Lettres.
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This is a must for those of us who deeply empathize with thematic elements in films such as Office Space or Trees Lounge. I actually was acquainted with a real housemates couple in Berkeley who could be characters in this novel, who in their "free time" romantically played computer games with each other and otherwise spent vast amounts of time behind a computer screen.
I remember the world before Atari and the internet. I recall anxious nuclear holocaust days prior to when "cyberspace" was a regular constituent in our mental vocabulary. Perhaps technology does in fact ennoble our human values and aspirations, or perhaps it is a means of convenient evasion from self-knowledge.
Coupland explores some of these concerns in this novel with real-life characters who could mirror those folks in tech cultures (Irvine, Silicon Valley, Seattle, and/or Portland)--a culture that is both oddly familiar yet cubicled in silence--nameless shadows who input code and ship products for our servile consumption.
At first it seems like Microserfs was written in 2011 with the hindsight of knowing where the events and technologies from 1993 to 1995 would lead in the future. But it was written in the time it describes. It's all the more impressive how prescient the absurd characters sometimes are.
The Kindle version was produced by OCR, feeding a physical copy of the book into a computer, leading to typos. This both distracts the reader and enhances the story, since the book is about just that kind of nonsense.
Whity, funny, yet emotionally honest and soul piercing at times, this book reveals the true nature of IT workers during the climb of the IT field. Written in 94 (i think), many of the lifestyles that Coupland wrote about then still hold true today. It showed me just how much of an IT slave I really am, but that freedom must first come from within, and that I am still a human being even though I work 60-70 hour work weeks. Is there a life outside of IT?
I think so! This book shows me the way and allows me to laugh at myself and the stupididty of my way of life. Thanks Doug...thanks for showing me there is more to life than computers.
kevin
Also I really love the references to "Bill." All in all, a fun read with some incredibly interesting insights into what the internet has become.
I've read the book before and enjoyed it but the Kindle edition was a bit of a chore. It looks like the publisher didn't even proofread this book once before uploading it. A shame, really.
Top reviews from other countries
One thing I particularly liked about the book was his take on family... Usually I don't think he paints a very sensitive picture of family relationships, instead this time he does and it gives a gentler, deeper novel because of it. Really enjoyable book and highly recommended.
This is a gentle, uplifting amusing tale.
Worth reading whenever you're down - Yes, you CAN reinvent yourself while remaining yourself!
But a great story, well written and genuinely funny. Really funny. Not those kind of small wry smile kind of laughs, but the ones out loud where you get embarrassed on the train kind of laughs.
You'll not regret reading this book.


