Hard America

EORGE DILL HAD A JOB as a technical writer for a company called Jacquard Systems, which is its real name; I feel safe in using it, because it's long gone, for reasons that will become evident. They had an early desktop computer -- this was the early 1980s. George started working for them about three months before IBM announced the PC. The Jacquard desktop -- they called it the J500; somebody ought to put one in a museum if it hasn't already been done -- was about the size of a hotel room mini-refrigerator, the kind where you can get beers for $8. If you put it on a desktop, there wasn't much room for anything else. It was so slow that its hard drive sounded like a pinball machine. It cost something like $25,000.

Anyhow, for the time George worked there, it was almost like a college dorm. Everyone had a private office, and even though it was in Manhattan Beach, the atmosphere was like Silicon Valley, free sodas, free popcorn, free bagels, tabletop soccer in the break room, come and go as you please, the works. His office was next to the office of a guy named Dwayne. Dwayne took technical writing very, very seriously. George had been doing it for several years, but he just did his work and went home at the end of the day. Not Dwayne. Dwayne saw technical writing as a calling. The two of them would get into chats about writing before they started work, and sometimes when break time came around they'd stand at each other's doors and chat a little more.

The trouble was that Dwayne wanted to say serious things about writing manuals for the J500, the best way to do it, how to learn the operating system, how you had to be able to set up the system just like a field engineer before you could understand what to put in the manual. George did actually do all that stuff. He was better than Dwayne, in fact. He could have the operating system re-installed and up and running before Dwayne had figured out where to put the diskette. So he tolerated Dwayne, but he was a little more serious than George liked.

So whenever George got the chance, he'd tell Dwayne war stories about the other jobs he'd had and how everyone screwed up. They were funny stories -- they were meant to be funny, in fact. Poor Dwayne would start off very serious, not really wanting to hear anything funny, but before you knew it, he was stifling a laugh, and his coffee would spew out through his nose. George was sorry for that, but as far as he was concerned, it was Dwayne’s own fault for not letting himself laugh earlier. Then George would get into the rhythm of the thing, and Dwayne would start laughing harder and harder -- he'd had the sense to put his coffee down by this point -- and before you knew it, he'd be laughing too hard, his asthma would kick in, and he'd get into a terrible fit of laughing and coughing at the same time.

George was being a little cruel to let this go on, and in fact I can't say that he didn't encourage it. But he kept up the routine. He'd start to remember funny things that had happened to him, and he'd talk about them, and Dwayne would laugh and cough even harder. George would have to pause to let him catch up. One day, Dwayne started saying, in the middle of raucous laughter: "You know -- I don't understand how companies advertise for managers. They advertise for a big specialized title, and they want all kinds of experience. If I were going to advertise for a manager, I'd announce the position in the ad like this:


COMPLETE IDIOT
Team Player

Maybe Dwayne was laughing to keep from crying. Anyhow, this time he laughed the hardest George had ever seen him, and then his asthma got the better of him, and he started coughing and coughing, and he got tears in his eyes, and the coughing didn't stop for a long time. Later that day, their boss came and told George there'd been a complaint, and she was going to have to move his office.

Nobody talked about it, but after all, the J500 took up most of a desktop, and the IBM PC didn't, and the J500 cost $25,000, and the IBM PC cost $5,000, and the IBM PC had a big IBM on it, and the J500 didn't, then you had to figure something was going to happen. You saw two trains coming down the same track, one in one direction, the other in the opposite direction, and you knew that if one or the other didn't stop in a real hurry, there was going to be one heck of a smashup. George had been chatting about that with Dwayne, too. Maybe that's one reason he'd been laughing so much harder lately.