Dr. Dobb's Journal August, 2005
Iwas crying on the shoulder of a customer at Foo Bar, the late-night Silicon Valley hangout where I occasionally moonlight as relief bartender for the tips. Not the money kind of tips—of which, for some reason, I don't get many—but the Valley insider kind of tips: Things I overhear in conversations, things customers let slip when they've had one too many.
"Sometimes I think I lack all the requisite social skills for being a bartender," I told him.
"You're being too hard on yourself," he said. "Do you have any more peanuts?"
"No, it's true," I said. "I didn't realize it until I started working behind a real bar."
"Oh, here they are," he said, rummaging behind the unreal bar. "By 'real bar' you mean—?"
"Tangible, actual, not a figment of my imagination like this one."
"A figment of your imagination. Like this one. Right." He pushed his glass forward. "I think I may need another of these."
"See, I've been working nights behind the bar at Summer Jo's, my real-life partner's southern Oregon restaurant," I explained as I replenished his Lavender Lemondrop, "and it's given me some insight into the fictional bartending that I do here."
"Fictional. Right." He looked at me from under his eyebrows as he sipped his Lemondrop. "Maybe you should pour yourself one of these. But what's this about lacking social skills?"
"As bartender, I should be listening to customer complaints," I said as I shook up the vodka and lavender-infused lemonade. "I should be offering ambiguous advice and saying sympathetic things like 'Why the long face?' and 'You're being too hard on yourself' and 'You don't say.'"
"Rather than, say, unloading your neuroses on your customers?"
"Exactly. And I should be telling bar jokes. That's a biggie. But it's the customers who tell me the jokes."
"You don't say."
"I do say. Just the other day a magazine publisher walked into the bar and said, 'A horse walked in to a bar and the bartender said, "Why the long face?"'
"'That's a good one,' I said." "That's an old one," he said. "You don't say," I said.
"I do say. Now, was that the real bar," he asked, "or this purportedly fictional bar that I'm sitting in at this allegedly imaginary moment?"
"I'm not sure," I said, sipping thoughtfully at my Lemondrop. "But it was the same bar where Larry Tesler walked in the other night."
"Larry Tesler, the Xerox PARC programmer who became Chief Scientist at Apple?" he asked. "Thin guy, soft-spoken?"
"Yeah, that Larry Tesler."
"The Larry Tesler who wrote a markup language back in 1969 or thereabouts that was a kind of predecessor to HTML?"
"Yeah, what was that called? Oh, right, PUB. According to John Markoff the manual had a picture of a British pub."
"Must have been this bar then. What would Larry Tesler be doing in southern Oregon?"
"But he was. It turns out he's owned property in the area since about 1969. Back then he was planning to live on a commune in Takilma."
"But he went to PARC instead?"
"More or less."
"I suppose working at PARC in the '70s wasn't that different from living on a commune in southern Oregon. So he was visiting his property?"
"In passing. He was actually in the process of moving from Seattle to the Bay Area."
"Larry Tesler was living in Seattle?"
"Yeah, he's been VP of Shopping Experience at Amazon for the past few years."
"I did not know that. And he was moving to the Bay Area to—"
"To do the same for Yahoo, he told me. As VP of their User Experience and Design Group."
"But Mike, that sounds like one of those Silicon Valley insider tips that you moonlight here to pick up. It must have been this bar."
I scrutinized him. "You seem to know a lot about me. Just who are you, anyway?"
"A figment of your imagination, apparently."
"I suppose so. Still, thanks for letting me cry on your shoulder."
"Not a problem," he said as he stood up and didn't leave a tip. "It's been real."
I wasn't so sure.