0.2 The funeral of bobo  (Page 3/12)

The hallways were long, running interminably between rows of individual offices. There wasn’t a cubicle or shared office in sight, Microsoft deeming it important to give every employee a private office, however small. My editor’s was one in a row of editorial offices at the far end of one hallway, where Star Wars , Star Trek and medieval-themed office décor gave way to posters of authors, folk singers, and floral arrangements—the stuff I remembered from girls’ dorm rooms in college. All the editors down here were women, their little cluster of offices an oasis of femininity in a vast desert of male nerdulinity.

Microsoft at the time had not yet entered the word-processor and other application software business that eventually would vault personal computers into the mainstream. It was focused on an operating system, MS-DOS, and personal-computer-language software programs (Pascal, COBOL, FORTRAN, BASIC) that were sold, as were personal computers at the time, mostly to hobbyists or curiosity-seekers with a lot of money.

These editors were working on booklets for programming mini-computers, as people were calling personal computers then, with languages like COBOL and Basic. Computer programmers, it turned out, were helpless when it came to the English language, and Microsoft had hired a large number of English majors to keep these booklets coming out as fast as their software programs did. People who bought personal computers would also get a package of five-inch-square, soft plastic discs, like the ones I used in my typesetting machine, and a binder full of these little manuals; you would use one disc to boot up the machine and load its operating system, then eject it and replace it with the disc containing whatever program you wanted to use.

I couldn’t believe there was any company anywhere that was hiring so many English majors. And when the English major who had called me out to Microsoft sat me down and explained what she wanted me to do, I couldn’t begin to believe how much she was willing to pay me.

Like all phototypesetters at the time, I charged a set amount for typesetting and pasting up each page, my per-page fee averaging $5—a dollar or more below the average among my competitors. The price covered the cost to me of typing and formatting my customer’s copy, running out proof sheets, photocopying them, bringing the copies to my customer for proofreading, and paying Butler for paste-up. After getting back the proofread copies, I would type up the corrections and changes, then cut out incorrect words or lines with a razor blade, stripping in the corrected copy. I charged 75 cents per correction for errors my customer made, and charged nothing to correct my own.

People at Microsoft didn’t want to be bothered with that much accounting. They simply wanted me to run out an entire new page whenever anything—even if only a single punctuation mark—had to be corrected, and they wanted to pay my full per-page rate every time I had to rerun a page.

In other words, the place was a money machine. A single 50-page manual, which might take two weeks from beginning to end of the project and would require only a small portion of each day in the bargain, could bring in a couple thousand dollars—more than I sometimes made in a full month of full-time work for other clients. And these editors always paid immediately, never bothering to give one of my invoices more than a cursory glance.