0.2 The funeral of bobo  (Page 4/12)

This was a working arrangement, I decided, that I could happily indulge in for the rest of my life.

How can I explain how strange it was to have something like Microsoft suddenly land in Seattle? Nothing about the place was normal: A typical Seattleite got by on very little money and had all the time in the world to accomplish whatever it was he or she wanted to do. But the people in this place were the opposite: They had all the money in the world, and were desperately short of time. They worked around the clock—before long, I found myself making deliveries as early as six in the morning and as late as ten at night—and never under any circumstances showed any concern of any kind over money. It was as if they were looking for ways to get rid of it—in the hopes, maybe, that it would buy them more time.

The other odd thing about Microsoft was the incongruous connection between its appearance and its drive. The people wandering frantically around Microsoft’s hallways looked just like normal (if nerdish) Seattleites. They were dressed in jeans, sweatshirts, T-shirts, flannel, boots, sneakers, wore their hair unkempt, and were often sloppily bearded. They sported, in other words, your basic laid-back Seattle look. Yet they crackled with purposefulness, ambition and fervor. They looked and acted like people who knew they were onto something unimaginably big, and they had the passion of True Believers. They always needed everything immediately, and were convinced that they were doing work that would change the world—an attitude that by tradition was hilarious in a Seattleite.

I found out during one of my visits that the company was run by a 26-year-old named Bill Gates—who, I was told again and again, was both a genius and a wacko. He had been raised in Seattle, gone to Harvard, dropped out after one year, and moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he founded what then was called the Micro-Soft Corporation. After two years there, he came back home—he had done his 40 days in the desert, and had had enough.

It was clear that Microsoft was headed for success-territory the likes of which had never been seen in Seattle. The excitement there was infectious and exhilarating—this amazing little emotional and financial boom exploding on the quiet eastern shore of Lake Washington. I kept waiting to feel in my heart the thrill I could see everywhere around me whenever I went out there. But instead, the more of this I took in, the more I found myself recoiling from it.

At first, I thought it was simply that I couldn’t imagine spending as much time away from home as these people had to spend. By now, we had two daughters, and being at home during the day, working mostly when the girls were asleep, left me exposed almost constantly to irresistible charm. Erin ran around the house all day either narrating her life in the third person (“‘Hi Dad!’ said Erin. Then she quickly ran into the kitchen…”) or explaining the world around her, as in: “This is the permanental fur cat; its fur is permanental soft. As it grows, its fur will usually grow soft. These are the ears. As the cat grows, it will usually get dots on its ears. This is ‘iminie,’ from playing roughly with other cats. And its tail is the usual soft, slim, round part of the body.” Meanwhile, her little sister Caitlin toddled around calling me “Little Shat” and taking me by the hand whenever I came upstairs from the basement, leading me to a couch, sitting me down, and correcting me as if I were a wayward child (“Now, Little Shat…you know that was a very bad thing to do”). The opportunity to give that up for the company of hyperactive computer geeks and endless work on algorithm-bedecked paragraphs about Basic and COBOL was horrifying.