"Oh-point-Oh" - Microserfs

I've been reading Microserfs by Douglas Coupland:

I read jPod a few years ago and this is pretty good as well. In it there's a part where everyone is offered jobs at a new start-up and leaves their secure, and profitable, jobs at Microsoft. One of them explains that he want to do it because he will be "oh-point-oh": he'll be in at the start of something new, something potentially revolutionary.

I think that's what's been eating at me the last few years with the job. I've been working, time after time, on systems well past their best years and it's been grating on me a little bit too often. I want to start anew, make something no-one has ever made before, even a new programming language. "Oh-point-oh".

The relationship between the protagonist, Daniel, and his girlfriend Karla also intrigued me. He's not as smart as she is and she provides a way for him to grow into being someone better than he starts off being, while he and his colleagues and family provide something for her to belong to, being alienated from her real family. Maybe this is the post-modern situation, that we are closer to our friends and colleagues than we are to our own flesh and blood?

Daniel keeps a sort of diary on his laptop (an Apple Powerbook) and he writes some of the most romantic and hauntingly direct prose I've ever read:

"I don't want to lose you. I can't imagine ever feeling this strongly about anything or anybody ever again. This was unexpected, my soul's connection to you. You stole my loneliness."

There's a moment when he's with Karla and she's reliving a traumatic episode in her life. He holds her tight, almost holding her together, and says:

"you're a thousand diamonds - a handful of lovers' rings - chalk for a million hopscotch games"

(the elemental composition of the human body: carbon, the diamonds, and calcium, the chalk)

Another one of the themes of the book is the transition, or even evolution, of the characters from merely being corporate cogs in the Microsoft machine ("cannon fodder" as Daniel says at one point), to being individuals in the start-up. It's a little like the self-actualising personality Maslow was on about.

Hey "Karla"! Thought you might like it this way. Try looking at the source.