Where'd You Go, Bernadette(34)

But then: Elgie ended up loving it here. Who knew that our Elgin had a bike-riding, Subaru-driving, Keen-wearing alter ego just waiting to bust out? And bust out it did, at Microsoft, which is this marvelous Utopia for people with genius IQs. Wait, did I say Microsoft is marvelous and Utopian? I meant to say sinister and evil.

There are meeting rooms everywhere, more meeting rooms than offices, which are all teeny-tiny. The first time I beheld Elgie’s office, I gasped. It was hardly larger than his desk. He’s now one of the biggest guys there, and still his office is minuscule. You can barely fit a couch long enough to nap on, so I ask, What kind of office is that! Another oddity: there are no assistants. Elgie heads a team of 250, and they all share one assistant. Or admins, as they’re called, accent on the “ad.” In L.A., someone half as important as Elgie would have two assistants, and assistants for their assistants, until every bright son or daughter of anyone west of the 405 was on the payroll. But not at Microsoft. They do everything themselves through specially coded portals.

OK, OK, calm down, I’ll tell you more about the meeting rooms. There are maps on every wall, which is perfectly normal, right, for businesses to have a map on the wall showing their territories or distribution routes? Well, on Microsoft’s walls are maps of the world, and in case you’re still unclear about their dominion, under these maps are the words: THE WORLD. The day I realized their goal was WORLD DOMINATION, I was out at Redmond having lunch with Elgie.

“What’s Microsoft’s mission, anyway?” I asked, wolfing down a piece of Costco birthday cake. It was Costco Day on campus, and they were signing people up for discounted membership, using free sheet cake as enticement. No wonder I get confused and sometimes mistake the place for a marvelous Utopia.

“For a long time,” Elgie answered, not eating cake because the man has discipline, “our mission was to have a desktop computer in every house in the world. But we essentially accomplished that years ago.”

“So what’s your mission now?” I asked.

“It’s…” He looked at me warily. “Well,” he said, looking around. “That’s not something we talk about.”

See, a conversation with anyone at Microsoft ends in either one of two ways. This is the first way—paranoia and suspicion. They’re even terrified of their own wives! Because, as they like to say, it’s a company built on information, and that can just walk out the door.

Here’s the second way a conversation with an MS employee ends. (MS—oh, God, they’ve got me doing it now!) Let’s say I’m at the playground with my daughter. I’m bleary-eyed, pushing her on the swings, and one swing over there’s an outdoorsy father—because fathers only come in one style here, and that’s outdoorsy. He has seen a diaper bag I’m carrying which isn’t a diaper bag at all, but one of the endless “ship gifts” with the Microsoft logo Elgie brings home.


OUTDOORSY DAD: You work at Microsoft?



ME: Oh, no, my husband does. (Heading off his next question at the pass) He’s in robotics.



OUTDOORSY DAD: I’m at Microsoft, too.



ME: (Feigning interest, because really, I could give a shit, but wow, is this guy chatty) Oh? What do you do?



OUTDOORSY DAD: I work for Messenger.



ME: What’s that?



OUTDOORSY DAD: You know Windows Live?



ME: Ummm…



OUTDOORSY DAD: You know the MSN home page?



ME: Kind of…



OUTDOORSY DAD: (Losing patience) When you turn on your computer, what comes up?



ME: The New York Times.



OUTDOORSY DAD: Well, there’s a Windows home page that usually comes up.



ME: You mean the thing that’s preloaded when you buy a PC? I’m sorry, I have a Mac.



OUTDOORSY DAD: (Getting defensive because everyone there is lusting for an iPhone, but there’s a rumor that if Ballmer sees you with one, you’ll get shitcanned. Even though this hasn’t been proven, it hasn’t been disproven either.) I’m talking about Windows Live. It’s the most-visited home page in the world.



ME: I believe you.



OUTDOORSY DAD: What’s your search engine?



ME: Google.



OUTDOORSY DAD: Bing’s better.



ME: No one said it wasn’t.



OUTDOORSY DAD: If you ever, once, went to Hotmail, Windows Live, Bing, or MSN, you’d see a tab at the top of the page that says “Messenger.” That’s my team.



ME: Cool! What do you do for Messenger?



OUTDOORSY DAD: My team is working on an end-user, C Sharp interface for HTML5…





And then they kind of trail off, because at some point in every conversation, there’s nobody in the world smart enough to dumb it down.

It turns out, the whole time in L.A., Elgie was just a guy in socks searching for a carpeted, fluorescent-lit hallway in which to roam at all hours of the night. At Microsoft, he found his ideal habitat. It’s like he was back at MIT pulling all-nighters, throwing pencils into ceiling tiles, and playing vintage Space Invaders with foreign-accented code monkeys. When Microsoft built their newest campus, they made it the home of Elgie’s team. In the atrium of his new building, there’s a sandwich shop with the sign BOAR’S HEAD FINEST DELI MEATS SERVED HERE. The moment I saw that, I knew I’d never see him again.