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February 9, 1998
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Well, last night after a fun time birdwatching and a lovely dinner with Nancy at our favorite restaurant , I decided I was motivated enough and in a good enough mood to reinstall the North American Birds CD and reconstruct my life list, basically make a new one. The Mac, however, had other ideas. First it had disk problems, so I ran the Norton Utilities over and over again - you have to do that because fixing one thing uncovers a dozen others - until the disk errors were all fixed. When I tried to install the bird CD, I got unmapped memory errors. I refreshed the P-RAM, rebuilt the desktop, ran the disk thingie again. Still errors. Gave up and decided to browse the web for a bit. First the ISP didn't answer or answered but didn't prompt for the login. Then every time I fired up Netscape it crashed. The trusty Norton Crashguard at least let me exit from Netscape instead of the whole darn machine freezing, but it's still annoying. This morning, I still couldn't dial in to my ISP - I think it was just too busy - not anything about my Mac, so I headed out to Starbucks with my copy of Close to the Machine by Ellen Ullman from City Lights. I'm 148 pages into it, it's a slim volume, and I feel like I've been through a storm. I feel raw inside. After the aridity of the first chapter - which made me feel like I was on a high wire teetering over a vast cold empty dry place I never wanted to be again - the hothouse feeling of the subsequent chapters made me uneasy and queasy. All this over a memoir? Of a computer programmer? Years ago, in the ancient Precambrian era of computing, I worked with a guy who spoke of programming in sexual terms all the time. "And if you do it this way, the payoff is orgasmic..." he'd say when he was advocating a particular algorithm. Actually, I worked in proximity to him, not on a project with him - he didn't allow girls on his projects. One night I was working late and was bouncing an idea of one of the guys who worked on his project. Neither of us realized he was still at work. He wandered by, stopped and gave us both a withering look and said "So, you talk to girls now, Henry?" We both shut up. He left. I watched who I used as a sounding board after that. So, I guess Ullman's coupling of the satisfactions of programming with the satisfactions of sex make sense in that universe, but I never got a sexual thrill from programming. Thrills yes, but not sexual. Designing an elegant way to do something, especially in the days when memory and disk space were at a premium, felt deeply pleasurable - it had a buzz like alcohol or marijuana or something. It was a high. Not an orgasm. That's not to say that people who did experience as sexual are wrong - just to say that's not how I experienced it. Come to think of it, the manager of the programming department I was part of then punctuated every sentence with "fuck". He also came on to every woman within a ten mile radius even though he was married. Macho programming manager. Everybody used the word "fuck" a lot. When I left there, I was shocked that people on the outside thought it was impolite. Ullman does explore the territory of loneliness, the loneliness that gets filled up with either programming or sex. And I've gotten the impression from other stuff I've read and a few of the Massachusetts high-tech crowd who moved west, that Silicon Valley is lonelier than the "Rt. 128 America's Technology Highway" area (also known as the Greater Maynard Area once upon a time). I base that observation mostly on a book I read by Dennis Hayes, which I now can't remember the title of , a collection of essays about life in Silicon Valley. A lot of the stuff he attributed to the silicon culture seemed to me to be more of an artifact of the way suburbs are organized in California versus the way they were organized back east in the past (that is, back east is also the past - not how things used to be in the east - someday I should learn to write an English sentence). When the great wave of mediocre programmers getting rich off their stock when the late 70's early 80's round of startups went public came through, the majority of them spent their new found wealth on houses - the scarce prizes of great price - rather than sports cars. I know I'm rambling here, so maybe I should stop. Neither sports cars nor houses fill up the emptiness but sex and programming don't either. Stop me before I quote The Confessions of St. Augustine... |
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