ABSTRACT
Douglas Coupland’s MicroSerfs tells the story of a group of mid-1990s information technology (IT) workers living in the eastern suburbs of Seattle in Washington State. Based loosely around the real life experiences of Microsoft employees, this paradigmatic novel frames the life of the dot-com era computer geek with remarkable precision. Spending hours a day staring blindly into their computer monitors, the computer science (CS) professionals gladly exchange their social lives, their families, and at times their health, for writing code for their enigmatic boss ‘Bill’. There is an almost religious devotion to IT that is evinced by most of Coupland’s characters; for them personal identity has become utterly subsumed under their all-encompassing concern for working in the IT industry. Hence the quote, ‘Without my computer, I am useless.’
