Neal Stephenson Quote

The first time he saw her, he formed an impression that did notchange for many years: She was a dour, bookish, geeky type who dressed like shewas interviewing for a job as an accountant at a funeral parlor. At the sametime, she had a flamethrower tongue that she would turn on people at the oddesttimes, usually in some grandiose, earth-scorching retaliation for a slight orbreach of etiquette that none of the other freshmen had even perceived. Itwasn't until a number of years later, when they both wound up working at BlackSun Systems, Inc., that he put the other half of the equation together. At thetime, both of them were working on avatars. He was working on bodies, she wasworking on faces. She was the face department, because nobody thought thatfaces were all that important -- they were just flesh-toned busts on top of theavatars. She was just in the process of proving them all desperately wrong.But at this phase, the all-male society of bit-heads that made up the powerstructure of Black Sun Systems said that the face problem was trivial andsuperficial. It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especiallyvirulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are toosmart to be sexists.That first impression, back at the age of seventeen, was nothing more than that-- the gut reaction of a post-adolescent Army brat who had been on his own forabout three weeks. His mind was good, but he only understood one or two thingsin the whole world --samurai movies and the Macintosh -- and he understood themfar, far too well. It was a worldview with no room for someone like Juanita.