Microserfs: A Novel by Douglas Coupland

Author:Douglas Coupland [Coupland, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature & Fiction, Contemporary, Contemporary Fiction
ISBN: 9780062105967
Amazon: B004W2YZ0I
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Published: 2011-06-21T04:00:00+00:00

SUNDAY

December 26, 1993

All family’ed out.

Karla and I drove down the hill to Syntex, birthplace of the birth control pill, a little bit below Mom and Dad’s house, down on Hillview Avenue—a 1970s utopian, Andromeda Strainishly empty tech complex. We sat in the grass amphitheater by the leafless birch trees, looked at the sculptures from the sculpture garden, walked over the walkways and pretended we were Susan Dey and Bobby Sherman on a date, falling through a dark cultural warp, and landing inside the technological dream that underwrote the free-wheelin’, swingfest TV-lifestyle of that era.

Syntex was the first corporation to invent the “workplace as campus.” Before California high-tech parks, the most a corporation ever did for an employee was maybe supply a house, maybe a car, maybe a doctor, and maybe a place to buy groceries. Beginning in the 1970s, corporations began supplying showers for people who jogged during lunch hour and sculptures to soothe the working soul—proactive humanism—the first full-scale integration of the corporate realm into the private. In the 1980s, corporate integration punctured the next realm of corporate life invasion at “campuses” like Microsoft and Apple—with the next level of intrusion being that the borderline between work and life blurred to the point of unrecognizability.

Give us your entire life or we won’t allow you to work on cool projects.

In the 1990s, corporations don’t even hire people anymore. People become their own corporations. It was inevitable.

Karla and I felt like the last couple on earth, walking through the emptiness. We felt like Adam and Eve.

I told Karla that Ethan doesn’t think biotech is such a hot investment because it’s “too 9-to-5,” and the workers follow non-techie time schedules, and their parking lots NEVER have cars in them on Sundays. Actually, to this day, Ethan is still trying to find a biotech firm with Sunday workers. He says that once he finds one, he’ll be able to invest the farm, lie back, and retire. If only Ethan had something to invest!

Karla picked some iceplant flowers, the semiofficial plant of the hightech world because it stabilizes hillsides so quickly. She said it’s thornlessness makes it “the Play-Doh” version of cactus.

We were being very freestyle. We discussed whether we should go try and crash into the research institute off the 280 where Koko the gorilla lives with her kitten. Karla said that the transdermal nicotine patch was invented just over the hill, on Page Mill Road, near the Interval Research Corporation headquarters. History! Then Karla suggested we visit Interval Research’s campus and see what it’s like: “If Syntex was the 1970s and Apple was the 1980s, then Interval is the 1990s.”

Interval Research’s headquarters were like a middle-class honeymoon hotel in Maui circa 1976, and slightly gone to seed, with Gilligan’s Island-style lagoonlets between the buildings and a lobby with a vaguely medical/dental, is-this-where-I-drop-off-my-urine-sample? feel.

And (important) there were CARS in the parking lot, even on the Sunday after Christmas.

Karla said she knew this girl Laura who worked there, and so we checked, and she was there.

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