James Grimmelmann, Microsoft

James Grimmelmann is a resident of Seattle, Wash., a software design engineer with the Microsoft Corporation, and the madman behind The Laboratorium.

Stayed late at work yesterday: My team was having a bug bash. We spent the evening looking for bugs in a twisted parody of a brainstorming session: Who can think up the most creative way to break the product? This one was pretty good. We found 65 bugs in about three and a half hours, and the whole thing wrapped up around 8:30. At which point I drove home. Alone.

I'm a sinner. I take the bus maybe one day a week; the days I don't, I save myself morning and evening walks of about 10 blocks. I know five other people in my group alone who live near me and who also drive the 12 miles to and from work. It's not a short bike ride from here in Seattle to Microsoft (in Redmond), but it's definitely possible. There's no justification for my ways, only excuses.

What I'm experiencing, I think, is flex-time's unanticipated revenge. Microsoft doesn't care when I'm at work, only that I'm able to get done what I need to get done during the time I choose to be in my office. This enlightened attitude -- which I sometimes use to work compressed weeks -- has two unfortunate side effects when it comes to my commute.

The first is that, like most of my fellow Seattleite Microserfs, I drive over to Redmond after the morning rush hour and back after the evening one. Because I have the luxury of driving on comparatively open roads, I don't have to suffer for my automobile usage the way commuters with more proscribed schedules do. I'm a nearly pure free rider, so to speak. If I had to commute at rush hour, I'd be on the bus every day, so at least I could read during the trip.

The other side effect of a flexible schedule is that programmers tend to keep stereotypical programmer hours: Get in late, work for a while, stick around really late chasing down some annoying issue, stagger home, sleep in, and get in even later the next morning. Those weeks when I've lost discipline completely and work from noon (or later) until near midnight (or later), public transportation is just not an option, nor is carpooling much more realistic. And even when my schedule is comparatively under control, taking a cooperative form of transportation to work means committing to leaving work on schedule, too.

A lot of us here need to clean up our ways, basically by taking on a little more responsibility in outside-of-work matters. That's not something that comes easily to many Softies, but there are encouraging signs. My neighbor in the next office lives in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood but bicycles to work with some regularity, and a great many people I know who live on the Eastside (nearer the Microsoft campus) bike in as their normal commute. The 263/266 has earned the nickname of the "geek bus" for the number of Microsoft employees who ride it (although, unfortunately, not enough to fill it up). In my old group, I came in one day and saw an EPA miles-per-gallon sticker on a coworker's office door: "61 city, 70 highway." That was how I met my first Honda Insight owner. He has since persuaded another member of that group to buy a Toyota Prius.

More dramatically, I was driving home one day a few months ago when I saw the strangest-looking vehicle I'd ever seen. Some research when I got home revealed that the mystery-mobile was a Corbin Sparrow, an electric car with a range of 30 to 60 miles, and which recharges from a standard 120-volt outlet. I wasn't entirely surprised when I saw it parked in a Microsoft parking lot a few weeks later. Its owner (the first in Seattle) works in my division, a fact I learned when another curious soul sent an email to the entire division asking who owned the "amazingly cool electric car." The owner reports many similar inquiries.

I guess this is one of the upsides of being part of a community of early-adopter technophiles: When new technology is green technology, there are people here willing to embrace it. As a company, Microsoft has an informal "version 3.0" policy: When it commits to a new product, it plans to see that product through several versions. Even if it flops the first time out, Microsoft will give a product another chance and will stand by it until it sees the success the company thinks it deserves. I like to think that this same attitude of confident investment in the vision of a sustainable future extends to some of its employees' attitudes about technology and the environment: We'll put our money where our mouths are and stand up for the Right Thing until other folks see things the same way, too.

Tomorrow, the bus!