Net Results: To me, a gal who spent her formative years in the heart of Silicon Valley, nothing brings home the fact that I am back in the Valley quite like a visit - dare I say, a pilgrimage? - to Fry's Electronics in Palo Alto.
Ahhhh, Fry's. No single location sings out "geek!" to me in quite the same goofily enticing way. Not that Fry's is always an electronics pleasure palace. The place is part of a big Bay Area chain well known for frustrating service - when you can get someone to help you at all - and half the time the "help" gives the wrong advice or tells you some other guy seven rows over, whom you, of course, cannot find, is the only salesperson who can answer your query.
On the other hand, you can only imagine the queries. Every Fry's is a vast warehouse of every electronics product imaginable. Its clientele are the world's brightest engineers and computer fanatics. Talk about specialised questions - it must be a nightmare to work there. I know I'd be ducking behind the printer display every time I saw a customer with a quizzical expression heading my way.
In Fry's, there are whole aisles dedicated to nothing but computer cables. Ribbon cables for those building their own PCs (as you do), serial, parallel, SCSI, USB, FireWire - you name it, Fry's has it in a little package hanging from its acres of little hooks or stacked in boxes on shelves 6 ft high.
There's an aisle of keyboards, an aisle of modems, an aisle of hard drives (internal or external, ma'am?). There's an aisle of wiring, of CD and DVD drives, of antennae , for the old-style radio hams. Five aisles of computers, Macs and PCs.
Processors and chips of all sorts? Got 'em, branded or generic. Fry's does brands, obviously, but at heart is electronics for the kind of people who ask for products by specification, not by whether names like Intel or Maxtor are attached to them. Anyone for a 128 megabyte PC100 168-pin DIMM module? Ask and ye shall receive.
On top of all that Fry's sells thousands of books, music CDs, household appliances, home video and audio, and every snack food known to man - or at least to Americans, which means every snack food worth its salt (or sugar, or fat-free, artificial sweetener). There's even a wall - and I mean a WALL - of refrigerator units dispensing cans and bottles of soft drinks. Engineers, as Fry's knows well, like to nibble and sip while coding or sticking some weird electronic part into a slot on a motherboard.
And the most bizarre thing about the Palo Alto Fry's is that the entire store is based on a Western theme. So you walk in past a hokey hitching post area and a model of a prospector panning for gold, and store signs are in that Western style that is supposed to look like bits of wood forming the letters. No one seems perturbed that they are putting their new PC into a Fry's king-size shopping cart next to a life-size model of an old prospector leading a donkey.
I was in Fry's to visit the wonderfully named Memory Department. While I was walking around trying to find someone to help me, I noticed each aisle had hanging above it a little picture and the name of the person in charge of it. I also noticed that every single person on these tiny signs was either Indian or Asian. There were names I recognised as Korean, Chinese and Vietnamese.
The Fry's aisle managers pretty well mirror the nationalities that fill the engineering departments of Valley companies and help drive the Valley's electronics industries. But these innocuous bits of evidence about the melting pot nature of the Bay Area - and the countries that push science and mathematics, hard - still has the ability to surprise. I can remember when there was only a single Indian restaurant in the entire Bay Area.
A nice Chinese guy eventually looks up the memory module I need for the PC I am fixing up for my dad. On the way to the check-out I stop to meander down one of the hardcore, little teensy electronic bits-and-pieces aisles, where half a dozen male engineers, are milling all in the Valley uniform of short-sleeve shirts or T-shirts and worn chinos. They stand, hands on hips, looking at the little bags of computer parts, pondering.
I don't know why I find it infinitely calming to stand among these guys, but I do. Perhaps I soak in a little geek therapy, standing in a soothing mesh of brainpower as they decide what part they need.
I've always liked the oddly logical minds and quirkinesses of computer people, engineers, and programmers. I've always enjoyed the certain commonality in the ways they look at the problems they need to solve, in the way that they trade information, in how they relate to the world.
I liked the film A Beautiful Mind because it captured those quirkinesses exactly. For me, the film's great success was in conveying what is most appealing about the typically shy types that love mathematics and computer science to a broad audience that probably doesn't spend a lot of time talking to mathematicians and engineers.
All of this is a clumsy way of trying to explain why I love writing about the technology industry, and why I never tire of talking to the people who work within it, care about it, make and lose fortunes from it, eat and breathe it every day.
Sure, there are plenty of unpleasant characters too, but for the most part I have a job that keeps me hanging around lots of beautiful minds. Coming out to Silicon Valley again always reminds me of this, and that's why I never fail to make at least one trip to Fry's - there's no better place to experience the geek melting pot than among those most at home in those vast, intimidating aisles.
