Microserfs, by Douglas Coupland
Reviewed By Susan Valek
Having been in Greater Phoenix Mensa for almost a year now, it has come to my attention that a goodly number of Mensans make their livings as (no surprise) programmers. Or, as it is so inelegantly stated in the Calendar section, we are the Computer Nerds. (Is that a redundancy?)
Are we weird? It's debatable.
Are there certain features that are common to Computer Nerds?
Ah, now there's an interesting question, and an answer of sorts is served up in Microserfs, a novel by Douglas Coupland.
His story begins at Microsoft (where else?) with a group of no-longer-fresh-out-of-school brilliant programmers in their late 20's, who, having done the Microsoft thing and now being vested, are beginning to consider to concept of "getting a life."
And then one of the group is lured away to Silicon Valley, and the others soon follow. And they discover that unlike Microsoftland in Seattle, where pure geekiness is enough, in Silicon Valley, you are supposed to have a life.
As we watch the group program, fall in love, program, deal with their families (parents, that is: none of them gets married), look for new funding for the project, come out of the closet, program, worry about money, send ridiculous email, and program, we see that yes, programmers/developers are different, and yet still have to grapple with life, just like the rest of us.
Novelists in their 20's are less likely to be bitter and disappointed in love and life. The narrator of Microserfs falls in love early on and stays in love through the rest of the novel. It is refreshing. Also he loves his parents, and gets on well with them. Parts of the novel deal with his parents' crises, such as being laid off from a job after more than 20 years, and a family tragedy: a brother who had died.
But Coupland manages to keep it light, zany and funny, without minimizing life's difficulties. An admirable book.
And now, back to the question of how CN's are different. Well, would you rather work the other 9 to 5? Did you play with Legos when you were a kid? Do you still play with Legos if you can get your hands on them? Did your dad work at a big computer firm? Did you ever go through: a Mad Magazine phase? a Lord of the Rings phase? an Ayn Rand phase?
Trivia question: What's the earliest reference to the term "NERD" that you know of? Coupland states that it goes back to the '70's. I have seen a reference in print that goes back to the '50's (it meant the same thing as it does now, only it was spelled "NURD" then). It's in Where the Boys Are, Glendon Swarthout's novel about all the college kids going down to Ft. Lauderdale for spring break "with every gland going berserk." Where the Boys Are is, of all things, another novel about kids with "the curse of a high IQ," and very funny, and a heck of lot better than the movie they made from it.
I received one reply to the trivia question even before this went to press (good trick, eh?). Steve Stewart says that back in the good old days at engineering school in the 70's, that it was spelled "KNURD" and meant someone who studied all the time, instead of going out to parties and getting drunk (KNURD is DRUNK spelled backwards). It did not in those days have the connotation of social ineptness, he says.