Microserfs

The CES is a trade show like all other trade shows: thousands and thousands of men, for the most part, wearing wool suits with badges saying things like: Doug Duncan, Product Developer, MATTEL . . . or NASA, SIEMENS-NIXDORF, OGILVY & MATHER, and UCLA, and so on. Everyone loads up on free promo merchandise like software samplers, buttons, mugs, pins, and water bottles as they dash from meeting to meeting. The booths are all staffed by thousands of those guys in high school who were good-looking but who got C+'s; they're stereo salesmen now and have to suck up to the nerds they tormented in high school.

We Oop!sters were in and out of meetings all day, mostly earnest affairs held in little rooms above the convention floor. They look the same in every hotel: chrome & glass rental furniture, extension telephones, and a water cooler. All these people meeting inside, wearing the first good suit in their life, turning old right before your eyes.

We were really just there to schmooze and do PR, since our distribution's taken care of, and to approach people to develop Oop! starter modules. Standard stuff. We also did "seed plants" . . . who you give your hardware to prerelease is a high status issue.

But I must say, there's something timeless about the false sincerity and synthetic goodwill of meetings, the calculated jocularity and the simian dominant-male/subordinate-male body language. At least the presence of Karla, Susan, and Amy saved us from the inevitable stripper jokes. Karla pointed out how in marketing meetings at Microsoft, everybody was trying to be fake-perky, and trying to fake having ideas, while at CES, everybody's trying to be fake-sincere and trying to fake not looking desperate.

Also, later, during rare, quiet moments, I'd look through the windows at other people's meetings, and they looked like Dutch Master cigar box people, but modernized. Old, but new . . . like a cordless phone resting beside a bowl of apples.

* * *

We had a "hunch lunch" in the hallway outside the Intel theater to compare notes on how the meetings were going. The Convention Center has the worst food on earth, served in the most humiliating, chair-free, low-dignity manner possible. People looked like dogs, hobbled over, eating high-sodium, by-product enriched, grease-lathered guck. Convention Center food in your stomach is like having fifty chest X rays, it's so toxic. In fact for the rest of the day, the "chest X ray" became our official standard of measurement for something that is probably very bad for you, which shortens your life, but which won't take its toll until much later on. If we met someone really horrible, we said they were like "ten chest X rays," and we'll probably die three days earlier than if we had never met that person.

* * *

After lunch, we went to see the Pentium movie at the theater Intel put up in the main lobby. It was about how interactivity was going to make your life better in the future, and we couldn't stop giggling because of all the Pentium jokes about decimal points being spammed around the Internet. You knew that every single person watching the show was, too.

"0.999999985621," I whispered, setting everybody off into spasms again, and finally we had to leave because we were annoying too many people with our giggling.

I guess if you find jokes about decimal places interesting, then you truly are a geek.

* * *

In the afternoon, in between meetings, Susan spent most of her time in the SEGA-Nintendo building, and reconnoitered with her fellow Chyx at the Virgin Interactive mini-bar. There was a rumor that supermodel Fabio was signing autographs in another building, so Susan and Karla dashed over to check it out. Sure enough, His Hairness himself was signing calendars and paperbacks among the booming car stereos. Susan and Karla stood in line for an hour and finally they each got their "magic moment": a few snatches of intimate conversation, sealed with a kiss and, more important, a Polaroid. Susan's going to post hers on the Net. I asked Karla what he said to her and she said, "Stereos are my passion . . . but only after you." Gag.

Todd got sullen because Susan and Karla kept on discussing Fabio's pectoral muscles . . . "They're like beef throw cushions . . . they're like fifty pound flank-steak Chiclets . . . they're like . . ." and Todd would say, "Enough already."

* * *

Went to about seventeen meetings altogether. At CES, everybody name-drops their hotel all the time. Hotelmanship is a big CES status issue - people kept on asking us during the day where we were staying. They'd say, "So, uh" (charged moment) "where are you staying?"

And we would casually reply, "Oh, the Luxor."