The movie nickname came from a 1998 Wired feature. Under the headline ‘Who Ya Gonna Call?’ the magazine ran a double-page photo, taken from a low angle, of Virugenix’s senior antivirus team, arms folded, stony-faced, wearing Oakley wraparounds and grey quasi-Trekkie jumpsuits. It was grudgingly agreed by their peers that the picture almost made them look cool. Or if not cool then at least functionally socialized. The article painted Virugenix as a new-economy success story, and its employees as heroic defenders manning the walls of the internet against the viral dark hordes. Naturally the team loved it, producing ‘Ghostbusters’ tees, sweatshirts and caps for themselves, strutting around and generally lording it over everyone else in the company.
By the time of Arjun’s arrival the Ghostbusters were still lording it, though many of the individuals featured in the picture had moved on. In Michelangelo there were fifteen, all men, assisted by a similar number of support staff. The oldest was the team leader, Darryl Gant, who Arjun reckoned to be in his fifties. ‘Uncle’ Darryl had a bushy grey-flecked beard and was the only person to have his own office, a workspace packed with waste paper, technical manuals and his extensive collection of NASA memorabilia. Inside this cocoon-like box he made whooshing noises at a 1:288 model Space Shuttle, disassembled code samples and tried as far as possible to avoid face-to-face contact with his employees. The youngest Ghostbuster was 21-year-old Clay A native of Marin County, he was an object of special wonder for Arjun, who had yet to come to terms with the Virugenix corporate culture. While Arjun tended to wear his blue blazer to work, Clay slouched about the office in shorts and Birkenstock sandals, his blond dreadlocks tied up in a strange hairy pineapple on top of his head like a Hindu mendicant. As far as Arjun could tell, Clay was not religious or even particularly ascetic, except when it came to toxins, which were apparently to be found everywhere in their workspace. On days when he judged the toxin count particularly high, he would wear a face mask and a pair of surgical gloves. He seemed to be Darryl’s special protégé, and the two of them were the analysts most regularly to be seen wearing the blue Ghostbusters splash-tops that were the latest badge of gang membership.
Clay occasionally came to talk to Arjun, leaning over the cubicle partition and telling war stories about a vacation he took in Goa, where he met a noted spiritual leader on Anjuna Beach and played host to an intestinal parasite with an unusual and picturesque life-cycle. Clay would usually slide into reminiscing about Inge, a Danish girl he met at an ashtanga yoga ashram. Sometimes, drinking smoothies through a sterilized straw, he would recount his epic fight with a person called ‘the ear-cleaning dude’, who attacked him with sharp instruments and had to be given money to go away.
Apart from Clay, most of the AV team were not particularly gregarious creatures. People did their thing and other people left them to get on with it. No one took much notice of Shiro’s habit of flapping his arms violently every few minutes or Donny’s refusal to allow purple objects into his field of vision. Everyone left their phones on voicemail and most wore headsets while they worked, creating a private sonic space that was, according to custom, violated only in an emergency. Interaction was via email, even if the participants occupied neighbouring cubicles. This made sense to Arjun. Personal space is valuable. The ability to prioritize one’s communications is valuable. Interrupting someone to talk to them is a way of pushing your query to the top of their stack. It overrides someone’s access controls and objectively lessens their functionality, which was as close to an engineering definition of rudeness as he felt he was ever likely to come.
Away from the top floor Arjun’s social life was limited. This was not a problem, since out of the office he was fully occupied with the various novelties of Redmond life (bus timetables, local government regulations, tree names) and the construction and maintenance of his home-computer network. In the cafeteria, like many of his colleagues, he tended to eat alone. A lot of people in the AV team shunned the communal areas of the campus altogether, finding them threatening and unpredictable. Though Arjun followed the workaholic Virugenix ethos (unofficial company motto: ‘Sometimes it is noble to sleep in the crawlspace of your desk’) in his rare moments away from his cubicle he sometimes craved conversation. He tentatively struck up nodding acquaintanceships with a Bengali who worked on firewalls and a Dilliwallah who did something or other for the diagnostics product team. He even took up an invitation to dinner with the Dilliwallah’s family, but, though he took the precaution of preparing a list of conversation topics, the evening was not a success.
What in-house socializing did exist was largely conducted through the circulation of entertaining data sets. The joke, in its classic office form, was popular.
Q. How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb?
A. None. It’s a hardware problem.
Unfortunately jokes seemed to cause confusion for some staff members, often provoking detailed (and even angry) dissections of their semantics. A safer mode was the questionnaire. Something about multiple-choice tests chimed with the r ‘n’ d personality, and formatted quizzes were sent round at the rate of several a day, asking the respondents to assess their knowledge of Angel, their ‘nerditude quotient’, their sexual performance. Week by week, Arjun learned more about himself. His dungeons and dragons alignment turned out to be Lawful Good. His penis was of average size. He was not a secret Mac user, though his lack of familiarity with sex toys and his inability to recall an occasion when he dressed up in leather or rubber clothing to please his man rated him ‘an old-fashioned gal’. Twelve lattes and nine Cokes a day also bracketed him a ‘high-level caffeine addict’. Worried, he sent an email to a support group, who mailed back suggesting he drank fewer caffeinated beverages.
One questionnaire generated more traffic on the Virugenix intranet than all the others. Under the heading ‘How Asperger’s are You?’ it asked the respondent to consider such issues as:
Do you meet people’s eyes when you talk to them?
Do you find it difficult to develop or maintain relationships?
Does ambiguity confuse you?
Do people accuse you of failing to share their interests?
Do others get angry or upset at you for reasons which appear illogical?
Do you have any inflexible routines or habits?
Do you excel at detailed logical tasks?
Do you have to remember to modulate your voice when speaking?