Close to the Machine_Technophilia and Its Discontents Page 11

  I tried to imagine telling Brian, “She’s all right with it.”

  There seemed to be no point in mentioning that the day I’d fired my friend, our friendship was over, and it sent fractures through our entire circle. So that even now, nearly two years later, we are all left with the tense mess of deciding who to invite where with whom. And all this came from a talk that took maybe half an hour: fifteen years’ worth of friendship trashed over a contract.

  So I let the conversation go. Besides, Brian and I were only doing what we were supposed to do. We’re supposed to assemble a group of people to do a job, get it done, then disassemble. We’re not supposed to invest in any one person or set of skills—no sense in it anyway, as Industry Captain understood. The skill-set changes before the person possibly can, so it’s always simpler just to change the person. Take out a component, put in a zippier one. The postmodern company as PC—a shell, a plastic cabinet. Let the people come and go; plug them in, then pull them out.

  The day after I saw Brian, I had time to wonder why he had even brought up the subject of firing his friend. Why tell me about it only to drop it immediately? Then I reviewed the course of the conversation and regretted I had kept my thoughts to myself. I had missed an opportunity, I thought. Maybe if I’d said something, we could have talked about it: how we’re both uneasy with the way we’re supposed to live. And how we do it anyway.

  Living a virtual life is an art. Like all arts, virtuality is neither consistent nor reliable. It takes a certain firmness of will, and a measure of inspiration, to get up each and every day and make up your existence from scratch. As every artist knows, every writer and homebound mother, if you are not careful, your day—without boundaries as it is—can just leak away. Sundown can find all your efforts puddled around you, everything underway, nothing accomplished.

  But the virtual life of techno-business requires something even more than inspiration. What is mandatory is that you present to the world the appearance of actual existence. You must seem to be a company in the usual sense of the word, with an office full of humming enterprise. Nothing is stranger than sitting in dirty sweatpants and picking up the ringing phone to say “Ellen Ullman speaking” in a mature, efficient voice. It is as if I have projected myself into another universe, where I am dressed in a blazer and slacks and my hair is washed, some place completely discontinuous with the universe I inhabit in sweats. While I speak on the phone—to a client, a CEO—I am aware that I have thrown my voice correctly, that they have seen me as I wished to be seen: a clever, enterprising woman sitting at a fine desk. To hang up then is almost painful. Click. I return to myself: creature swimming alone in puddles of time.

  Beyond a certain tone of voice, the facade of constructed reality is entirely electronic—and therefore revir-tualized. Internet address with your company name as the domain; fax machine with your company’s name entered to appear on the receiving end; voice mail that answers in a receptionist-sounding voice, not your own; phone number that ends in zero-something, so that callers will believe they have reached you on your direct line, not your only line; letterheads produced on the LaserJet; invoices created by Excel or Quattro Pro or QuickBooks—all this and more create the necessary illusion of definitive, standard existence. It’s a little scary just how easy it is to do this.

  And, once your own electronic existence is established, you start to notice how many of the entities around you are similarly electronic and therefore as suspect in their reality as you are. Spotting the unreality of other home and small businesses becomes so easy it’s no sport. But what about the larger business world? Looked at in a certain way, you can ask, What is Charles Schwab but a giant computer connected to a telephone? All those buildings are there for reassurance, like the marble pillars of banks and the brick walls in my loft.

  And what is a corporation these days but an elaborate verisimilitude spun round with the gauzy skin of electrics? I call an 800 number to order equipment: Am I calling the real company? Who can tell? The person I’m talking to is most likely an employee of yet another company, one that has been subcontracted to perform telemarketing or distribution. Or, more likely yet, the individual is an independent contractor paid by the hour by the company working under contract to the company selling the equipment. And, in endless rounds of deconstruction, the company selling the equipment may itself simply be an entity with an 800 number, suppliers, and subcontractors. It orders bits of hardware from other companies (each with its own 800 numbers and subcontractors), assembles things in cases, puts them in boxes, advertises, and lets someone else answer the phone. Behold: the modern global corporation.

  And businesses that exist as Web sites: the perfect devolution. Maybe all enterprise will soon be like the NASDAQ—a network entity, wires and cables and satellites, everywhere available and nowhere present.

  But what difference does it make: Why should I care about a company’s physical coordinates? What does it matter if the person I’m talking to is sitting in the basement of corporate headquarters or at home thousands of miles away? The telephone, the fax, the computer network reach everywhere, don’t they?

  In the days before ubiquitous computers, I briefly worked for an insurance company. I was a temp. My job was to answer the phone in the claims department, find the claim file corresponding to the caller’s auto accident (it was a paper file), put the file in a special out basket, then buzz the adjuster. Done; next call: a real shit job. The only thing that made it tolerable was the fact that, about thirty percent of the time, the file I needed was missing. This great tragedy—the lost file, motive and justification for the very existence of the business computer—was my occasion to search the premises. I went up and down the elevators, from desk to desk, learning and following the route of information inside the company. By the fifth lost file, I knew what an adjuster was, had met them all, knew what account managers did, and had met them all. I knew the full range of actions performed by an insurance company, something I’d known absolutely nothing about when I’d started. If I had wanted a career in insurance (a very unlikely ambition for me but a perfectly reasonable one for a young person with no better prospects), I was ready to advance from temporary claims-phone-answerer-file-puller to something better. At minimum, I’d like to think that the poor sufferers of automobile accidents received better service for my knowing the adjuster handling their claim—knowing him in person, by name, by looks, and by sight; the names of his children and wife.

  Twenty-five years later, the young man taking my order on the telephone was very sorry: he could not tell me if the Insert key was right next to the Backspace. This detail about a laptop’s keyboard was important to me; I hate hitting Insert when I’m going for Backspace. “It’s not in my database,” he explained.

  His name was Marshall Schoen—my experience at the insurance company made me keep up this antique tradition of asking for someone’s full name. “Marshall,” I said, “Is there someone you can call and ask?”

  I heard him shuffling papers, hitting keys. “Sorry,” he said for the second time, “All I have is the information on the screen.”

  “Where are you, Marshall?” I asked.

  “Where? I’m … . What do you mean, where am I?”

  “I mean physically. In what state are you, what city?”

  He named a place on the prairies, fifteen thousand miles from Japan, where my prospective laptop, with its mysterious keyboard, had been designed and assembled. I felt sorry for Marshall Schoen. There he sat in his cubicle. He could not get up and hunt around for the missing information; he wasn’t allowed to get up at all. All he knew was on his screen, tiny porthole surrounded by darkness. He would never learn anything about the company in Japan, about laptop computers, about the local distributor, even about the process of telemarketing. There would be no better job at this company than the one he had right now: sitting at a computer monitor, wearing a headset, answering the phone. He could stay or leave. His computer was up or down. Between those poles
was nothing: no lost files and no way to find them.

  “Sorry, Marshall, but I’m afraid I can’t buy the laptop without knowing about the keyboard,” I said, wishing I could give him the order.

  I think he heard the regret in my voice. “Yeah, I see that,” he said. He paused; the line went quiet, the whole global network lying between us in a vast, amazing silence. “I’m sorry, too,” he said.

  I used to have an idea of myself seated at a desk. I would see myself from the back, my head bent over some work, wholly absorbed in whatever I was doing. That absorption, a certain absence from one set of things and extreme presence to another, became an emblem for me, some ideal way of being, a self toward which I worked for most of my life.

  It wasn’t until I began to work at home, and one day during a period of anxiety mixed with boredom I projected myself across the room, so that I saw myself from the back, so to speak—it was on that day I understood that the person I had been imagining all those years was not me at all. It was instead my father, at home, at his desk, wholly absorbed in whatever he was doing.

  My father had an office at home as well as his business office, and he liked to sit at his desk in the family room while my mother, sister, and I idly watched television. His ears were always covered with the headphones, as he listened to his preferred radio station playing inoffensive music. The station sounded distantly on speakers in the living room, so that I had this idea of my father as existing not here, in the family room with us, but projected into the living room, where he lived in some exalted state of busy aloneness.

  It’s not surprising to me, then, that I now live alone and have my office in one corner of the one large space that makes up my loft; not surprising to me that I believe I should be working all the time; no surprise at all that I can’t relax except after a long bout of work. My father was presented to us as a model human being, and he was always working. But what I am surprised to learn is this: how much he wanted the isolation of work, and how much I don’t.

  My work hours have leaked into all parts of the day and week. Eight in the morning, ten at night, Saturday at noon, Sundays: I am never not working. Even when I’m not actually doing something that could be called work, I might get started any minute. So everything is an interruption—a call from a friend, an invitation to lunch—everything must be refused because it is possible that from one moment to the next I will get back to something.

  This state of boundarylessness I could only have learned from my father. He puttered at his desk in the morning then went to the office to work; he came home, had a nap and dinner, then went to his desk in the family room to work. So it was that he was there and not there, among us and not among us, all due to the perfect protection from other human beings called having your own business.

  I grew up helping my father balance his books. We did this once a month at the dining room table, with my father calling out the amounts and me totaling them on a huge, ancient adding machine. The table filled with curls of adding-machine paper. My mother brought us snacks and iced drinks on coasters. The household hushed around us.

  In the end, though, this hallowed cocoon of work did no good for either me or my father. When my father feuded with his partners, he had no one to turn to, no friends, no business associates, no one but the family. But, by that time, I was as resentful as I was flattered by his attentions. More than thirty years had passed since I had helped him balance his books, years my father and I had spent admiring each other, and testing wills against each other, from a great distance. By then, we were both too attached to our working selves and had quite forgotten the language of relation. He was sick with cancer and spent his days in stunned rage over the loss of his company. Even so, it took a great deal for me to say, “I love you, Dad,” and for him to answer, “The same from me.”

  I can see myself from the back now: at my two desks, surrounded by my four computers. I’ve turned on the television, a familiar noise to help me concentrate. Now and then, I’m aware that I’ve tuned into Ricki Lake, a program I watched for the first time when my father was dying in the hospital. What drifts back at me is the horrible boredom of death, which no one ever talks about, but which exists all the same: the hours spent sitting on a hard plastic chair in a tiny hospital room while the television, ignored by the dying, plays on for those attending. For a moment, the boredom of death and the dullness of work intersect. Am I earning a living, I wonder, or just trying to fill a very large, self-made solitude?

  I’m far from unique in my lonely virtuality, I realize. The building I live in—reconstructed lofts, a kind of yuppie dorm without dining room (too bad about the dining room; food service would have made this place close to perfect)—is full of little one- and two-person companies. I’m told we home-based businesses are the new engine of employment, the future of work. Delivery guys love us: We’re the new housewives. We’re always home.

  There is a comfort in living among one’s own kind. On my way in from the garage, I pass a small loft occupied by a single man who must be in his late thirties or early forties. From his outgoing nature, I assume he is in sales—acting as a small distribution office, maybe, or a local representative of some company far away. Anyone can look in and see his clothes strewn across the floor. The man himself sits at his dining room table working on a laptop. The TV is on, ignored, for company.

  In the afternoons, I see us virtuals emerge blinking into the sunlight. In the dead hours after 3 PM, we haunt cafés and local restaurants. We run into each other at the FedEx drop-box or the copy shop. They, like me, have a freshly laundered look, just come out of pajamas or sweat pants, just showered and dressed.

  I recognize my virtual colleagues by their overatten-tion to little interactions with waiters and cashiers, a supersensitivity that has come from too much time spent alone. We’ve been in a machine-mediated world—computers and e-mail, phones and faxes—and suddenly we’re in a world where people lumber up and down the steps of buses, walk in and out of stores, have actual in-person conversations. All this has been going on while I was in another universe: that’s what comes to us with a force like the too-bright sun or a stiff wind off the bay. We do our business, drop off the overnight packet, clip together the xeroxes, and hurry home.

  Sometimes I think about taking a real job, with a real company. So what if my virtual company is what everyone imagines is a perfect life? I’m no different from anyone else: I want the security, routine, and camaraderie of the office. At the AIDS project, I watched a year and a half pass in the comforting round of holidays. One day there were spiders hanging from the ceiling and witches on the wall; the next, Indian corn and leaves pinned to the windows, like a grade-school classroom in the coziness of fall; later, blinking lights on the reception desk, the tree, the holiday party. I think it would be relaxing to take a job, have the soothing circle of the seasons go ’round you, go someplace where they’ll understand if you get sick or just tired.

  Then I remember: I was once a devoted employee. I stayed at a software company for two years, left, went back. Contented in that real-company sort of way, I thought I would stay forever.

  But one day I arrived late to work from a dentist’s appointment to find my colleagues heading toward me with their belongings in cardboard boxes. The software company had been swallowed up by a much larger one. Only a small maintenance crew would be left. My project and all the others had been killed, and what remained of two years of my group’s work was backed up by someone in a hurry. Later it turned out that the back-up format was unreadable.

  Of the original project team—something grandly called “The Advanced Products Group”—only my boss and I were left. We were now to be in charge of “special projects.” That is, we’d been given the courtesy of time to look for new work.

  Soon a work crew came to take down the partitions. Until then, for the first day or two after the layoff, it hadn’t been clear how alone my boss and I were. Once the cubicles came down, though, we could see all the empty
desks. We could see how packed in we all had been—a vast space that once had been filled with programmers. After the partitions, the next things to go were workstations and monitors. Then the freestanding furniture. Last were the phones. In the end, we were left with a whole office floor with nothing but carpeting and dangling cables. Falling from ceiling tiles, cascading from posts, dripping down walls—nothing but the sprung ends of dead computer networks.

  It was all the dangling cable that finally drove us out. My boss and I had been huddling near our former workspaces—what once had been “deluxe” cubicles, the double-wides of the modular office-furniture world. But there was something about all the open space and cabling. We strolled around and around the empty space for two days, wondering what we should do. To pass the time, we counted the number of dead connectors: how many RJ11s, serials, parallels, phone jacks. Once we had counted all the cables, we gave up. We withdrew to the last two solid offices: things with hard walls, metal windows, wooden doors. From there, we used the last remaining phone to start the search for new work.

  My boss and I never really spoke about it, but over the years, in odd indirect ways, we’ve signaled to each other how we went to opposite and extreme reactions against all that emptiness, all those sprung dead cables. No one who goes through a layoff is ever the same again. Some faith is gone, some comfort level is lost. You learn how delicate your place in the world is. Any day, you could be coming from the dentist to find that your social, laboring existence has literally been ripped away.