0.12 Kidsplace  (Page 2/9)

Mitskog had grown up in North Dakota , then gone to the University of Texas at Austin and, like Gammill, started working for Microsoft while still in college. She had been at Microsoft longer than Gammill and now was one of the company’s “technical evangelists”—people who go out to hardware and software companies and attempt to persuade them to develop products taking advantage of coming new Microsoft operating-system features, like those supporting display and manipulation of multimedia elements. Both she and her husband were reputed to be among Microsoft’s brightest employees, and both had earned substantial bonuses, raises and stock grants every year they had worked at the company.

In many ways, Gammill was the consummate 1990s Organization Man . He was on an established career track at Microsoft, earning generous raises and bonuses every six months and moving up the salary ladder as quickly as company custom allowed. He and his wife had a large investment portfolio that they managed carefully, and had opened a coffee house, called Seattle Bean , in New York City. They were stolid, politically conservative, extremely wealthy 20-somethings with an unwavering devotion to their employer and lives that were extremely conventional and staid by any standards I could imagine. To be 25 years old with a house in the suburbs and more than a $1 million in a diversified asset portfolio was, from my perspective, to be tragically, prematurely adult.

For all of their seriousness and level of achievement, though, Gammill and Mitskog were still like kids. Adult behavior looked funny on them. Gammill wore a T-shirt, shorts, and boat shoes without socks nearly every day to work. I was at their house for dinner one night when I came upon Mitskog standing helplessly in the kitchen, carefully reading cookbook instructions on how to boil asparagus.

Gammill, too, came across as a brash and irreverent kid rather than a prematurely serious adult. His favorite quote about Seattle came from a Beavis and Butt-head episode: “Seattle, yeah…that’s that country where everybody’s cool.” His hardest habit to break after getting married was sleeping with the radio turned up loud all night long. “Nikki didn’t care much for that,” he told me. Once a month or more, he would walk from his home down to a nearby video arcade, called Quarters , and play games for hours at a time. His favorite game was Total Carnage .