1
 
New Year’s Eve
 
 
My idea for handling December 31, 1999, was that Jena and I should fix a nice meal, drink champagne, watch TV, and stay clear of the Y2K bug. I bulldozered over Jena’s gently voiced objections. I figured that at midnight the power would go out and the rioting would start. We’d lock the door and light some candles, and Jena would smile at me and kiss me and say I’d been right to make us stay home. In my mind, that’s what was going to happen. And, hey, even if I was wrong about the rioting, we’d miss a Millennial traffic jam.
My secret hope was to get Jena in bed before midnight so we could be in each other’s arms right at the moment of the Big Flip, all those nines rolling over to zeroes and the two of us close as close could be. That was the right way to usher in a new Millennium! Yes! Not that I came out and told this to Jena, as I knew very well that she would have preferred to go somewhere complicated and expensive.
Jena liked sex even more than I did, but she didn’t like for me to make assumptions about when we’d do it. It was always supposed to be some kind of surprise. A spontaneously occurring romantic impulse. A force of Nature, unpredictable as an earthquake or a hurricane. When in fact it was inevitably every one to four days. One of the ways I passed my time at work was to update an Excel spreadsheet tracking our sex frequency. I had a formula in one of the cells to compute what I called the DBS index. A rolling average of the days between sex acts. When the DBS rose above three, it was time to turn on the charm. Buy flowers, talk about Jena’s problems, do like that. Not that I always did. To tell the truth, a high DBS was my fault as often as it was Jena’s. Even though I talk a good game, I’m not the most highly sexed guy around.
Thanks to a stressful Christmas visit with Jena’s mother and stepfather back in Prescott, Arizona, the DBS was up to 4.1. I should have at least planned to take Jena out for dinner on New Year’s Eve. Put us both in a romantic mood. But by the time the facts hit my radar, every place was booked and full, as things always were in California. Not that I really and truly looked that hard for someplace to go. I was fixated on my game plan. Hit the sack before midnight and the romance would take care of itself!
Late in the afternoon of New Year’s Eve I drove over to the Kencom campus in San Jose to bag this experimental TV set from our lab. In my pinheaded ignorance of what women actually care about, I had the notion that if I brought home some really cool electronics, then Jena would be down with staying home on New Year’s Eve. As if.
Spazz Crotty was there in the lab, busy at his giant flat-screen monitor as usual. A tall, skinny guy, late twenties, a few years younger than me. I’m thirty-one. Spazz was wearing baggy, long skater pants, black leather sneakers, and a T-shirt with The Finger on it. He had short, bleached-blonde hair, with the sides of his head shaved. He had a ring in his nose and a big silver stud up on the top of his ear. I kind of admired him. Spazz was cool. He had tattoos. Jena had always wanted me to get a tattoo.
“Yo, Spazz.”
He did a voice recognition thing, answering me without looking up. “Hi boss. Want to watch me write some TRACE statements? Nasty bug in the serialization code.” Even though Ken Wong had hired me on as the product manager for the 3Set development team, I knew next to nothing about programming, and Spazz never let me forget it.
“You shouldn’t be working, Spazz. Today’s a holiday. The Big Flip.”
“So what’re you doing here?” Spazz broke into coughing, having trouble getting his voice started up. He coughed a lot.
“I want to take the 3Set home and test it out. You haven’t broken it, have you?”
“It’s working,” said Spazz. He had a hoarse, wheezy voice, and he talked very slowly. Every time Spazz spoke, he made it sound like he was letting you in on a big secret. “I was watching the Teletubbies this morning. I was getting really good depth. But then when I went to save and reload the image I got a power-switch crash.”
I felt a surge of annoyance. “We don’t need the freaking save and reload. We took it outta the beta spec last week. It’s developer gold plating. You were at the meeting. Why are we even talking about this? It’s New Year’s Eve, dude.”
Spazz turned and stared at me for a minute, fingering the hoop in the side of his nose. And then he smiled, suddenly happy as a kid let out of school. “Thanks for reminding me. What time is it?
I’m supposed to meet Tulip at home.” He glanced back at his screen. “Jesus, it’s almost six. I’ll ifdef out the serialization code, do a rebuild, and close it down.” He hit a few keys and the build messages began scrolling down the bottom of his screen. No warnings, no errors. We were almost ready for production. “You’re taking the 3Set?” said Spazz. “Does Ken know?”
“I might have mentioned it to him,” I said. Though of course I hadn’t. No way would Ken want the 3Set leaving the lab. It was so secret that even his venture capitalists didn’t really know what it was. Not to mention the fact that the 3Set was, theoretically at least, dangerous enough to be a liability risk.
Spazz grinned. “You’re the boss, Joe.” He copied the fresh build of the 3Set driver software to a Zip disk for me, shut down his computer, put on his leather jacket, and held the doors for me while I carried the 3Set out to my leased silver Explorer SUV, a premium model with the full Eddie Bauer trim package. The 3Set was a heavy mofo, with a thing like a fish tank instead of a picture tube. A true 3D display. The chips in it had a way of combining successive TV images to build up a 3D image inside the tank. It was pretty neat, when it was working. The risk aspect had to do with the fact that there was a hard vacuum inside the tank, and it could conceivably implode. But I was cool with that. I set it onto my back seat and fastened the seat belt around it.
Spazz’s red Japanese motorcycle was next to my car; he took out his keys and unfastened his helmet from it. “We’re outta here, huh Joe?” said Spazz. It was getting dark. There was a Wells Fargo bank right across the lot, with people lined up to get money out of the cash machine. I’d already gotten mine.
“What are you doing tonight, man?” I asked Spazz.
“Riding up to San Francisco with Tulip.”
“Was it hard to get reservations?”
Spazz gave me a pitying look. “The taquerias on Mission Street don’t take reservations. You’re so uptight, Joe. It’s like you’re middle-aged. I bet you’re planning to stay home and watch TV. On the 3Set, right?”
“You’re gonna wish you were with me when all the lights go out,” I said. “The roads’ll be gridlocked. It’ll be straight outta Mad Max.”
“have to admit I’m just a little bit worried, too,” said Spazz earnestly, using his slowest, hoarsest voice. “I have this mental image of the Earth as being like...