What Horror! Lyndy And Sue Teach The Nerds A Thing Or Two

 Eric Ellis Palo Alto

06/20/1998

They might now have the biggest house, the sharpest car and the fattest stock option package, but geeks with table manners? Ordinarily, that wouldn't be a cool look for Silicon Valley's awkward 20-something squillionaires so enamoured of their anti-hero slob status they name corporate conference rooms after American snack food brands.

But as the world's businessmen descend on Nerdistan's precocious pointy-heads, one-time British model Lyndy Janes is out to change all that. Janes and local partner Sue Fox could have passed as Bond girls back in Roger Moore's Octopussy days.

Well-spoken, well-groomed and, well, experienced in the more refined ways of the non-tech world, they run The Workshoppe, a charm school for Nerdistan techies with an etiquette problem, and a growing schedule of foreign business meetings.

Appropriately enough for the location, Janes and Fox generate some of their business from an internet site: www.etiquettesurvival.com.

"When I first moved here, I was appalled," says the horrified Janes.

"These are people who drive Lamborghinis to the office - and they lick gravy from their knives." At $US75 ($122) an hour per person for a basic three-hour session of ten, the two are carving a tidy little business from bad manners and, because this is California, a media profile in counselling geeks on which knife to use when, when to burp and not to fart at the table.

It's a daunting task.

When Businessweek magazine recently ran a cover story on Netscape's 26-year-old founder Marc Andreesen, Nerdistan's original geeky fat boy, it portrayed him in smart suit and professing a new-found fondness for chardonnay, to illustrate his corporate coming of age in the battle against Microsoft.

Not true, said Netscape's indignant PR machine after it was published, pointing out that "Marc still loves the junk food".

Moreover, Andreesen's minders said, Netscape's strategic sessions are often held in conference rooms named Jelly Donut, Curly Cheese Fries, Pringles, Jolt and Pork Rinds.

This is a community with problems, and food and how to eat it are two of them. The area reputedly has one of the world's highest penetration of take-away pizza stores, the junk-food culture evident at the famous Fry's computer store in Palo Alto, which keeps a soft drink and snack food counter at the check-out. Big-city expense- account lawyers and bankers on Valley business tend to stay in San Francisco, 60 kilometres away, rather than in the Valley's heartland. But on this particular night at Zibibo's restaurant in Palo Alto, down the road from Stanford University, Janes and Fox are doing their thing for a party of ten, mostly from Adobe Systems, one of Nerdistan's leading companies.

The Adobe crowd approach it as a night school, their attendance all the more remarkable as this is the night that NBC airs the last episode of Seinfeld.

Janes may look like a Bond girl and affect a fruity English accent that plays well with easily impressed Americans, but she's virtually a Cockney by birth and name-drops that she is the sister-in-law of English football legend George Best, whose reckless ways could teach tech slobs a thing or two about bad behaviour.

But the irony of that, even if she understood it, is lost on 30 year-old Liz, regaling my left side with a tale of how she recently visited France and "just found it soooo civilised".

Meanwhile, to my right, clean-cut Richard is all messed up with the table bread. "What if I want to keep my bread throughout the dinner?" Richard asks Lyndy.

Lyndy is adamant, "No, there comes a time, darling, when you just have to let go!" The two non-Americans laugh. The Americans take notes.

Flanked by her $US29.95 Jane Fonda-like videos and photographs of exemplary table settings, Lyndy runs the group through cocktail hour procedure.

"When the waiter comes by with the drinks tray, YOU DON'T GRAB and you hold your wine glass by the stem," she counsels. "And when someone offers their hand to shake, shake it assertively, not a Bone Crusher and not a Limp Fish either."

An Asian guy with the Nerdistan "uniform" of thick glasses, white T-shirt, woollen vest and a thing for dessert asks, "what happens if you notice his fly's undone?"

Lyndy adopts a school-marm persona. "Tell them, dear!"

She continues with cutlery procedure, soup and doily protocol, toasting -"don't drink your own toast" - napkins and buttering bread.

"Pull off a little bit of bread at a time and don't lick the butter knife or don't wave it around, you're not conducting an orchestra."

The class takes it all very seriously, taking notes as if they were at nightschool learning a new skill, which they actually are.

Business is booming for Janes and Fox, and their roster of "students" reads like the Fortune 500 - IBM, Apple, Sun Microsystems and Oracle, all big Valley exporters.

And they are contemplating diversifying beyond European table manners to the various Asian or Middle Eastern customs, depending on where Silicon Valley sells its wares.

"The demand for what we are doing is incredible. Even if students take away one thing from our classes, they've learnt something," says Janes.