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Just the building, a wooden structure with primary-colored
sculptures out front remains, like a neutron bomb
was dropped. Chains protect the empty parking lot.
The company I’m working for has scaled back
from its heyday too. A biotech startup sublets some
of the space, but the employee cafeteria in the building
where I work is still there, minus the cafeteria and
the employees. It’s a lovely atrium with ferns
and a stream known as Jurassic Park; all the conference
rooms are named for dinosaurs.
And I worry—do these people not realize the
irony of naming your meeting place for an extinct
species? One friend worked for a startup named for
Icarus, who flew into the sun with wax wings.
A module in the software I’m working on is
named for Cerberus, the dog who guards the gates to
hell. Another is named for Cassandra. I guess the
era of irrational exuberance is truly past. Or maybe
there’s a job for classics majors after all.
After the bottom fell out of the internet revolution
and my clients went out of business (more because
they didn’t listen to my advice than because
they did), I found new projects in NY and Michigan.
But California was slow to recover. Everything here
was tied to the industry. When software companies
went under, so did the dog walkers and nannies and
fusion restaurants. At least with long-distance clients,
I didn’t need to shop for clothes.
I did a lot of soul searching after the crash. I’d
quit my job a year too early, taken a sabbatical and
headed for Angkor Wat and Barcelona in a year when
I could have billed $150 an hour for just about anything.
Now that I was eager to work again, competition was
fierce for boring software projects I didn’t
even want. I took singing lessons and made a documentary
and studied baseball history for “Jeopardy.”
Did I need to buy Prada boots and move to Manhattan?
In the midst of my existential crisis, my cousins
arrived for a conference. Bill is a rabbi, and during
some discussion or other, he suggested I’d make
the perfect rabbi. “But I don’t believe
in god,” I protested. Interestingly, he didn’t
think this was a problem.
I went to reunions of software companies I’d
worked for, and we’d scour the group to see
if anyone had successfully made it out of high tech.
We’d all had pre-IPO stock options and sports
cars. One product manager opened a trendy bar. A QA
tester had a flower business. I thought surely it
would be me discovering a new life and passion. I’d
reinvented myself before.
But so far I cling to this stubborn notion that companies
care enough about their customers to allowed trained
professionals, not merely the most technical person
in the room, to design their products. Unfortunately
this once pioneering field has become a business,
with culture battles between the Ph.D.s and the MBAs.
Working on a contract in San Francisco, I press H-E-L-P
on my phone for the help desk, and reach Marco in
the Philippines. My friend Eric was laid off from
this exact job. And yet I loved my virtual tech on
the other side of the Pacific, who always remembered
my name and asked about the Giants and didn’t
mind staying late because of the time difference.
He gave better service than many of the surly geeks
I’d had to beg to fix my laptop over the years.
Last month, I was visiting friends in North Carolina,
where I contemplated a giant origami Tyrannosaurus
Rex, made by an artist from New Zealand who had since
been deported by homeland security. And I wonder:
did the dinosaurs know their time was ending? Did
any of them have the insight to reinvent herself,
before she too became a shadow of her former self,
before nothing but the puzzle of her bones remained?
So I stand at the twilight of the computer age, a
child of the microprocessor, seeking the next stage
in my own development. What comes after OS X? I did
not have many dolls growing up, but I did have a robot.
Of course because it was my family, the robot played
roulette. My parents were both stockbrokers, my birth
announcement tellingly an IPO.
Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise me that school
boards in Kansas and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are
once again eager to teach “intelligent”
design. I believe in evolution fervently: it reassures
me that eventually people who are more afraid of gay
marriage than preemptive war will die out. Unfortunately
those people tend to have nine children, while I have
none. Survival of the fundamental-est.
Last Friday driving home past Computer Curriculum
Corporation, I was surprised to see a gathering of
people out front, until I realized they were skateboarders,
attracted by the bold geometric shapes, flying off
the red and blue sculptures into the air. A new generation,
reclaiming the valley where not so longer ago there
were corn fields and cherry trees. Maybe there’s
such a thing as evolution after all.
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