**OT** Message From a Microsoftoid Who Died Young -- Increase the Bandwidth of Life
[and with that, djane decided to go outside...]
abcnews.com
Special to ABCNEWS.com
Those of us who live and work in technology
occasionally need to be reminded that there is more
to life than bandwidth, baud rate, market share,
stock prices and the uses and abuses of monopoly
power. It is easy to be so absorbed in the Silicon
Rush that we forget entirely about what really
matters-or, at least, really should matter-to the
human beings our obsessive work in technology is
supposed to benefit.
Early on the morning of May 18-the day the federal
government and 20 state
governments filed broad
antitrust suits against
Microsoft-one of the
company's brightest,
most able and most
dedicated employees
died after a year-long
struggle against
melanoma. Her death
sent a quiet and
cautionary shock wave
reverberating through a
community far too young
and workaholic to
meditate at all on anything beyond tomorrow's crushing
deadline.
By age 33, Nicole Mitskog had excelled at everything she
tried-even the management of her own death and funeral. A
stellar high-school student and state high-school golf
champion, she went on to Texas A&M, where she earned a
degree in electrical engineering in 1988. Like many of
Microsoft's stars, she started work for the company before
she got out of college, and by the time she stopped working
10 years later, she had system-engineered or managed some
of Microsoft's most complex and trouble-fraught
projects-including its first, groundbreaking work in
multimedia systems software.
An Uncommon Colleague
In a campus where nearly everyone is remarkably
accomplished, Nicole stood out as an exception among the
exceptional. She was uncommonly beautiful, uncommonly
brilliant and uncommonly kind, and those under her
supervision often marveled at how sweet their Microsoft diet
was in comparison with that of employees under more
conventional supervisors. She married at age 27, and had
borne two children (now age 5 and 1) by the time of her
death. She struggled mightily-as all Microsoft parents
do-to balance the limitless demands of the company with
the demands of her family, and managed this balancing act
with unrivaled grace and good humor.
In my own extensive (and often lurid) study of
Microsoftoids at work, I have noticed that all of them-save
for Nicole-spend their time on campus working with
unrelenting, grim resolve. Nicole was the only person I ever
met there who was almost constantly joyful at work,
whatever the pressures of competition, deadline or Bill Gates'
mercurial moods. Her joie de travaille was often infectious,
and more often a source of comfort and relief to those who
worked with her.
Warning for Workaholics
I was not surprised to see the church packed to overflowing
on the day of Nicole's funeral. Nor was I surprised at the
outpouring of grief-the sounds of sobbing and sniffling
prevailed throughout the ceremony. But all of us in attendance
were caught thoroughly by surprise when it came time for the
reading of a letter Nicole had written a few weeks before, to
be read at her funeral. She admonished her mourners not to
be sad for her, as she had had "a great life," filled, she said,
with two wonderful children, a wonderful and loving husband
and wonderful work. She went on to say that she had more
cause for happiness than most people who live two or three
times as long.
Knowing full well that her audience would be composed
largely of Microsoft employees, she went on to issue a gentle
admonishment. If there's one thing I can give you by way of
advice, she said, it is this: "Take the time to enjoy life."
The advice was received with a palpable jolt. A good
three-quarters of the mourners were young people who had
done little with their lives but work, work, work in the service
of a cause that, in light of Nicole's words, now seemed out of
control. As the service wound to conclusion, that simple
sentence hung in the air, luminous and alarming and seemed
afterward to be hanging in the air outside as well.
A Moment of Silence
What happened next is telling: The funeral ended in
mid-afternoon on a workday, and you would have expected
people to rush back to Microsoft in their habitual panic. But
instead, they lingered in the parking lot, then fell languidly in
line behind the hearse on its way to the cemetery. And what
is certainly the longest funeral procession I have ever seen
made its way through the clogged and frantic streets that
make up the region around the Microsoft campus.
We passed through a number of intersections, stopping
traffic for minutes at a time, and I saw harried driver after
harried driver reaching reflexively for their cellphones,
jamming them into the sides of their faces, and angrily telling
someone, somewhere in the World of Work that they were
being held up by a damned funeral.
Those of us who were newly enlightened looked
condescendingly at the benighted around us, and went on to
linger at the graveside, consoling one another and catching up
on old times, far beyond the allotted time. And we couldn't
help but remark upon two related developments in the
technology world that day: the Microsoft flag was flying at
half-staff, as is the company's custom in such circumstances;
and the nation's pagers had fallen eerily silent. Conventional
wisdom has it that a failed switch in a distant satellite was to
blame for the latter; Nicole's devotees knew better.
Fred Moody is author of I Sing the Body Electronic: A
Year With Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier. His book
on virtual reality will be published this year by Random
House. |
