Dr. Dobb's Journal April 2000
One of the things you learn working in a bar is that some people don't know when to quit. "Ed, you're done," I told one of the regulars at Foo Bar, the late-night Silicon Valley hangout where I moonlight as relief bartender to pick up industry scuttlebutt. Ed nodded graciously and headed off in the general direction of the front door, stepping carefully, as though walking on eggshells. Not that he was, you understand. I admit I don't sweep the floor very often, being only the relief bartender. But never eggshells. Peanut shells, yes. No end of peanut shells.
Just then, Rudy Doone walked in, crunching across the floor. I hadn't seen Rudy since he had packed up the Land Rover and moved to rural New Mexico two years earlier.
"Give me a Margarita, Mike," Rudy said, sliding onto a bar stool. "With any 100 percent blue agave tequila you've got. And how the heck are ya?" He seemed in fine spirits, which surprised me. He had been pretty edgy the last time I saw him. Of course, at that time he was expecting Western civilization to come to an imminent halt.
I performed as instructed. "You learned something in New Mexico," I said.
"Huh?"
"You learned to specify the tequila in your Margaritas," I said. "Peanuts?"
"I learned more than that in New Mexico," he said, shelling a nut. "You know how I got my start?"
Another thing you learn as a bartender is to recognize the opening line of a long story. I excused myself to take care of my other customers, then came back to give Rudy my undivided attention.
"I think I do remember how you got started," I said, wiping the bar as I talked. "Didn't you invent CASE tools or something like that?"
"I invented," he said in that overly precise tone people use when they are correcting you, "Object-Centric Canonically-Structured Paradigmatically-Produced Provably Proper Software Design Methodology Pictogrammics."
"Oh, right, those little boxes and arrows."
"Those little boxes and arrows is right." He wiggled his empty glass in front of my face and I jumped to it. "I made a lot of money off those little boxes and arrows."
"But didn't you later renounce everything you said about the software-design process in that other book -- what was it called?"
"They Shoot Dead Programmers, Don't They? Yep, made a lot of money off that book, too." He dropped another peanut shell in the pile by his elbow.
"And I know you did well with Third-World Sweatshop Programmers Are Gonna Eat Your Lunch, American Programmer."
"Almost as well as I did with the sequel, Well, I Guess Third-World Sweatshop Programmers Didn't Eat Your Lunch After All, American Programmer."
"I think a lot of us learned something important from those two books," I said. "Speaking of which, weren't you going to tell me what it was you learned in New Mexico?"
"I'm getting to that," he said, shoving his again-empty glass in my direction and scattering peanuts on the floor with the hem of his serape.
"My real labor of love," he said, looking lovingly at Margarita numero tres, "was my Y2K book, You're Gonna Die Unless You Read This Book."
"Did well, did it?"
"It did okay, but I lost a bundle when I bought ten grand worth of tofu and double-A batteries and sold my condo at a loss to move to New Mexico."
"You were pretty sure civilization was coming to an end, weren't you? Must have been terribly disappointing when we all survived."
"Not really. Know why?"
I thought about it for all of two seconds. "You've got a contract for another book."
He beamed. "Right on, Michael. It's called, How to Survive the Coming Worldwide Economic Collapse and Consequent Terrorism in the Wake of the Imminent Asteroid Impact by Writing Your Way to Fame and Fortune."
"Should do very well," I said, but my attention was drawn to the other end of the bar, where old reliable Ed was sitting again, apparently having failed to find the door.
"Ed! You're done!" I shouted. Unsubtle, yes, but I wanted to make sure I got my message across.
Michael Swaine
editor-at-large
mswaine@swaine.com