An excerpt from "Virtual Romance" by Paulina Borsook loris@well.sf.ca.us I was at a conference with the usual assortment of tech-weenies, dweebs, programmer geeks, wireheads, and brainy-type science guys. There were lots of academics and Grand Old Men of computing and foreigners that could be spotted immediately because they were too well-dressed. There were a few Internet wizards that could be identified by their combination of hair and ageing: some had sloppy Pigpen hair on receding hairlines, some had grey-haired ponytails. Anyway, I was on line at the dinner buffet, for once having decided to forego room service. The allure of being one of the few women in a male-dominated setting, the promise of easy pickings, had long since worn off but here, at least, there weren't any industry touts to be run away from, no flacks, no managers of marketing communications who would score points with their bosses if they lassoed me into having dinner with them. Why not try to be sociable for a change, momentarily forget my raving misanthropy, and cultivate industry contacts as my boss kept hinting that he was paying my salary for me to do. As I was standing holding a plate, and knife and fork rolled up in a napkin, I glanced up at this guy who had just butted into line. What's that, I thought. He was tall, he had a good haircut, he wore his suit well, he was consciously groomed the way only European men can be, his wing tips were shined. His name tag said "Dirk Van Hooeven, Salomon Brothers." What was he doing here. Dirk introduced himself to me and the two or three other men around me. We all sat together; Dirk piled lots of sweets on his dessert plate, which seemed out of character with his general correctness as bond analyst. Dirk suggested that we all go to a nearby jazz club. I hate jazz, but I was too curious about him to let on; besides, this crowd of innocent nerds would be puzzled by my explanation of why I hate jazz, how I had tried to like it by listening to it a lot, that I'd even had a jazz bass-player boyfriend, that I knew it was a lapse in taste like liking George Winston or not liking Robert Rauschenberg. The poor darlings would be scared and confused by such talk, and if Dirk liked jazz, as a lot of Europeans do in their infatuation with all things exotically American, I didn't want to scare him off. So we went off to the jazz club, a product manager from DEC, a QA engineer from Wang, an MIS director from an army base near Sacramento that I'd never heard of, Dirk the Wall Street quant, and me. Everyone was scrupulously polite. The married ones brought out pictures of their kids. The music wasn't intrusive at all. I noticed Dirk's nails were very short, very pink, perfectly manicured. He offered to walk me back to my hotel. Oh goody, I thought. He escorted me to my elevator and said goodnight. Dammit. When I got back to my room I watched the 1 AM showing of Top Gun on the in-room pay-per-view TV channel. That was the great thing about business travel: I lived better on the road than I did at home, got my fix on popular culture in my favorite way randomly, passively , and never had to pay for any of it. The next morning while checking in to get copies of the conference proceedings, I saw an information packet with the initials "DVH" lying on the table. I took out one of my business cards and scribbled "hi, I couldn't resist leaving you a note when I saw your stuff here," and stuck it beneath the rubber band that had been stretched around the packet. I sat down on a folding chair along the edge of the conference room. This morning's panel discussion had promised to be the most heated because it had sprung from a Birds-of-a-Feather session the night before. While Dirk and I had been exchanging pleasantries at the Holiday Inn's Cherries lounge, TCP/IP gurus had been plotting the migration to OSI standards. Because the technical session was ad-hoc, there might be shouting. I always enjoyed the religious wars in the scientific community, though I almost never understood what they were about without taking aside a native informant and having him explain what the two warring factions believed in. The partisans of connectionless transport squaring off against the partisans of connection-oriented: it didn't matter that what they said made no sense, because the invective was great. "Brain-dead," "trivial," "obvious." Such language. I turned on the new mini-cassette tape recorder that a vendor had given my boss. It was no longer the fashion to give out such expensive freebies, but this was from a startup in Florida that was kind of out of it anyway, judging by the parity-product nature of their initial offering, which might turn out to be vaporware anyway. It figured that they didn't know what they were doing, because all those guys down there were spinoffs from aerospace or Harris or any of those other companies that had specialized in military junk, and they just didn't understand how things were different now. Silicon Valley spent its marketing money differently. My boss had enough electronic toys as it was in fact, we had a five-dollar bet going on how soon I was going to buy a VCR, easy money for one of us because he was a classic early adapter, I was the classic Luddite so he offered it to me, half as a joke, if I'd get their matrix switch into the book. I didn't mind; while I didn't much care about the new information technologies, much less want to think about how I should spend my money on them, I didn't mind being given a piece of them for free. Dirk sat down beside me. He asked me what I was working on. I said I didn't know yet, that I wouldn't know until I got back to my office what was worth writing about. He asked me what magazines I thought he should read. He industriously wrote down all the titles I listed, but I knew he would never look at them. He might as well have been asking me about my hobbies, my pets, what I did with my spare time. His point was to keep me talking about things I could seem to be expert in. Then I noticed my tape recorder had stopped running. I asked him if he could figure out what was wrong with it. I had long since given up being worried about appearing to be a woman who is useless with machines: I was, and there was real power in self-acceptance. Dirk picked it up from where it had been lying on the seat between us. The way he flipped the hand-sized device on its back, the knowledge in his finger tips as he poked and prodded at the buttons, the knowing what to do with what he had been presented with, broadcast erotic competence. He was the dream of sensorimotor intelligence married to expensive after-shave. Dirk told me the problem was that the machine was in voice-activated mode, and because we were sitting so far away from the speakers, and our whisperings had been so quiet, the tape-recorder was stopping and starting. I proposed that we leave the session anyway, because neither of us was paying any attention to it. He agreed, and we decided to take a walk along Cannery Row. I took secret glee in having this gleaming whippersnapper with his peculiar animal radiance tagging along beside me in view of the blue Pacific. It was my personal revenge on the cosmos. For all the times I had been obliged to listen to spiels on V.22 bis and packet-switching and why this year was going to be the year of the LAN. For having been forced to dine with all the company drones who might well have been Disney Audioanimatronics dolls, except that they had crusty skin. For all strange-looking, well-intentioned, maladroit men I had been forced to occupy common space-time coordinates with for professional reasons. Whereas with Dirk, the most banal of his comments on the weather held charm. Dirk said he was going to be in San Francisco the next day talking to the operations manager in Salomon Brothers' offices in the Bank of America building. He asked me if I wanted to have lunch. . . . ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The rest of the story of Dirk and Justine, that is, the entire text of "Virtual Romance", can be obtained through the Internet's Online Bookstore at 'obs@tic.com' You can easily browse the Online Bookstore in the WELL Gopher in the Business in Cyberspace menu, or use your gopher client directly: gopher tic.com .