Days of Distraction

by Alexandra Chang

  At the airport and here comes the newest editor (the one who claimed he didn’t know how to get me a raise). He pulls me aside and says, “You did great coverage. Let’s talk when we’re back in SF.”

  See, somebody noticed.

  Today, I turn twenty-five. A gigantic bouquet wrapped in burlap is delivered to the office under my name. At first I think it is a gimmicky gift from a startup and am embarrassed. But then I see, on top of the bouquet, a handmade card in the shape of a heart cut from thick green folder paper. I can’t wait to spend forever with you, written in J’s sloppy scrawl. One of the plants I think is a magnificent flower turns out to be a small head of cabbage. I show any coworkers who ask.

  “I guess you have to go with him, then,” says Tim, with his signature sarcastic tone.

  “This is one of those rare moments when I think having a boyfriend could be fun and nice,” says Jasmine. “But it doesn’t take long to remember, oh yeah, men are terrible. Don’t look at me like that. I mean most men, not your man.”

  The new EIC has been shipped from NYC headquarters, and on his first day, he shows up with a celebrity. They walk into the office to craning necks and not-so-casual stroll-bys. The new EIC believes in celebrity covers, in well-known faces selling newsstand copies. This is giving people what they want: an actor goofily embracing a robot. The EIC himself is very young for his job, thirty-two, and he wears beautifully tailored suits and leather oxfords. He slicks his hair back with pomade so that it shines under the office’s fluorescent lights. His skin looks like molded wax. The publication’s parent company bred him to take over the website and sent him here to us. The old-school San Franciscans resent the pressure to dress better.

  The actor happens to be up from LA this week for a premiere of some indie flick (why else SF?), so the new EIC has invited him in for an up-close look at where the future is fulfilled. The celebrity asks to meet Tim, who, having written a mega-viral magazine feature about the safety pitfalls of AI technology, has become a momentary celebrity in his own right. I wonder if Tim will ride this wave of acclaim straight out of here and into a more lucrative, higher-status job. The new EIC grips Tim’s shoulders, seeming to have the same thought and hoping to anchor him there with praise. Our best guy. Our star. The kind of sharp reporter who digs up the deepest, buried scoops. The stories you didn’t even know you desperately needed to know.

  As the celebrity and Tim talk, I roll away to the farthest edge of our shared desk and hunch over my laptop. Another kind of person might leverage the proximity to introduce themselves to the celebrity, or cozy up to the new EIC. This is what a fellow consumer technology reporter, Kevin, is now doing. Tim tenses. He is not a fan of Kevin. Kevin is all Southern California positivity and good vibes, though he’s originally from Nevada. He talks brightly and loudly, his speech littered with clichés and curse words. But more importantly, Tim does not respect Kevin as a reporter, especially after Kevin failed to do much in Vegas, according to Tim. The celebrity greets Kevin with practiced, fatigued poise. Kevin asks to take a selfie. Then he asks if the EIC and the celebrity want a photo together. Nothing is real unless it is documented, captioned with a mini essay about having “the best job ever,” publicized to everybody—meaning whoever happens to follow Kevin’s social media feeds, which is a lot of people, because Kevin is also one of those natural promoters—to see and to like and to judge. And here I am, on my phone, quietly doing all three.

  The newest editor and I meet in the cafeteria, at one of the steel dining tables. He sits at the head, so I sit at the corner next to him.

  “Like I said, great coverage on the Vegas trip,” he says. “I just want to check in to see where you’re at.”

  I worry Tim may have told him something about my leaving, but then he says, “What are you thinking long term here? Do you want to do tech news forever? Go into features? Essays? Something else?”

  “Oh, long term I’d love to write more features and essays,” I say. “I like the speed of news writing, but it would be great to take on bigger stories, maybe broader tech and society pieces, or even science stuff.”

  “Great. I’d be willing to work with you on your pitches, help you expand out of the gadget scene, if you want?”

  I nod. “Yes, definitely. Thanks!”

  “Sounds good, we’ve got a plan,” he says, and slaps the table. But before he gets up, I ask whether he can also talk now about the possibility of a raise.

  “Oh,” he says. He chews on his lip for a while and bites off a piece of dry skin. I start to bite my own lip. “You haven’t heard anything from the higher-ups?”

  “No, nothing new,” I say.

  “Hmm, well,” he says. He shifts in his seat. “They’re probably busy, then. Give it time. Here’s my advice: focus on the writing. As it is, you just don’t have a strong personality or voice coming through. In your writing, I mean. Think about Tim. When you read his pieces, doesn’t matter what they’re about, they’re distinctly him. Sometimes I read your stuff and I’m like, this is clean, easy to edit, smart, but a highly intelligent algorithm could do it, too, and probably with fewer errors—not with the tech we have today, but it’s not too far off. You wouldn’t want to lose your job to a robot.”

  The editor laughs. I surprise myself by laughing a little, too, as though on cue.

  “Upping your voice is how you’ll stand out. I’d suggest pitching the print side, too. They have to know you before giving you more, especially with the new EIC. We all need to stand out in order to stick around now.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Anytime you want advice on a pitch, I’m here.” He slaps the table again and says, “All right, back to work.”

  “You look off,” Tim says when I return to our desk. “Was it bad news?”

  “No,” I say. “He offered to work on pitches with me.”

  “That’s awesome. He wants to help you out. Good sign. Take advantage of it.”

  i hate him i hate him i hate him, I text J. he basically lectured me and called me a robot. and it had NOTHING TO DO with a raise, like i thought it would.

  He replies with a crying-face emoji. You’re the cutest robot I’ve ever seen.

  I reply with a frowning face. No.

  Jk. You’re the cutest, smartest, most deserving person

  that’s better

  But then I remember, I laughed automatically when the editor laughed. Like a robot.

  I started in the newsroom at twenty-three. I was the youngest staff writer in the room until a couple of months ago, when they got a new fresh-out-of-college boy for the Business vertical. It had meant a lot to me. It still does. I felt I’d achieved something meaningful in landing a job here. I compared the speed of my rise with others’, I looked at their employment histories on LinkedIn, I made timelines for how soon I could move up to a senior or editor position. I am nowhere close to the best-known tech reporter my age—there are places that brand their writers with big personalities and those people become huge names—but I don’t want to be famous. I just want to quietly move up. I have a decent reputation, plus the backing of the publication’s reputation. Some people here say I have a lot of potential. The last three young writers with potential who came through my position left for the New York Times. I thought I wanted to do whatever I could to follow that trajectory. But now, well, I don’t know if it’s possible, if it is in conflict with the other plans, like where J and I will go. Or if I even have it in me to be a part of this for much longer.

  My mom wanted me to have stability and safety, to avoid having to experience any “very bad, sad years” as she calls that time of our lives when she supported us on her two part-time jobs and, I now realize, credit cards left unpaid. Better yet, I could lift the whole family out of this perpetual state of minor discomfort. I wasn’t doing a great job of it, despite having worked since fourteen. Before this, I was part-time at another tech publication, proofreading e-book guides for Luddites with titles like: Smartphone Camera Basics: Shoot
ing Tips Your Way and Switching from PC to Mac: Don’t Worry! and How to iPad: The Future at Your Fingertips. I was also an assistant to a rich woman in Pacific Heights. And I commuted to Berkeley once a week to help out with admin work for the university’s engineering department (though I majored in rhetoric). There were other gigs scattered here and there, whatever I could land to make some extra cash. I couldn’t quite settle, and it unsettled my mom.

  “Why not go work at a big company?” she’d often say. “Google or Facebook. Then your future is good. Writing on the side.”

  But I didn’t listen. Now I wonder, would I have been happier if I had?

  When the first editor here interviewed me, he walked us past the newsroom, where dozens of people sat at their desks typing with what looked at the time like fury and passion, and into a bright, window-lined space.

  “This little room was the publication’s first office,” he said. “Rented out from another company. Now we just use it to have meetings and store all these extra gadgets.” Boxes and bins lined two gigantic shelving units. An electric bicycle rested in the corner. On the wall, a black square clock that looked more like an art piece displayed the time in a grid of illuminated letters: IT IS HALF PAST TWO.

  “Cool,” I said. I didn’t know the publication’s history. I didn’t know anything specific about technology, but I figured I used a smartphone, a computer, and the internet better than the average person. I wanted to write; it didn’t matter at the time about what.

  He sat on a low leather couch, and I sat across from him in a matching low leather chair. He slouched lower and lower as the interview progressed, until he was practically lying down on the couch, his legs splayed forward in the space between us. I tried to look at least mildly comfortable. I uncrossed my legs and leaned forward.

  “Let’s say I assign you an explainer on dual-core versus single-core processors. What would you say is the difference?”

  “Dual-core processors are faster because they have two times the processing speed?”

  “Well, not really. It’s faster because—” I didn’t understand what he said next. “I bet you if I asked that of anybody out there, not one would give the correct, technical answer. What I need on my team is somebody to fill in the knowledge gaps.”

  I said I was a quick learner.

  “So who are some tech reporters you admire?”

  I listed some names I’d only recently learned, names that accompanied the articles I’d read to prepare for the interview. He nodded approvingly. “I like his work, too. Really contextualizes tech use for the everyman,” he said. “Yes, that guy always has the sharpest reviews.” When I mentioned admiring the desk for which I was interviewing, he said, “No need to flatter us.” But he smiled and added, “I have a feeling we’ll be working together soon.”

  “It’s not a lack of confidence in oneself preventing people from going after jobs where they don’t meet all of the qualifications, but a lack of confidence in other people’s abilities to view them as capable of doing the job, and therefore hiring them,” said the leadership expert, who had surveyed one thousand people to come to this conclusion. “The main barrier is not a mistaken perception about themselves, but a mistaken perception of what is a real requirement or rule, of how processes like these truly work, and this is especially a problem for women.”

  In an attempt to show versatility, I pitch a story to a senior magazine editor about a startup that’s genetically engineering plants to make them glow. The company uses a gene gun to shoot custom DNA sequences (based on glowing marine bacteria, coated on nanoproduct) into plant stem cells. The editor accepts the story and says I should turn it into a two-page piece about technological developments that will save the environment, the idea being that these plants will be able to replace streetlamps and whole cities at night will eventually be lit with leaves. After I interview the founder, however, it becomes apparent that the plants can barely glow at all. They are dimmer than a weak night-light. The photos on their website, he relents after I press him, were all taken in a pitch-black room with extremely slow shutter speeds. But we’re making progress! he promises.

  The editor for the piece is severely disappointed in the development, and says that the story will now be a two-hundred-word sidebar in the Front of Book and that I should still include a line at the end: “In the future, our streets could be lit by glowing trees!”

  It’s not technically a lie—we don’t say how far into the future, and “could be” is not equivalent to “will be.”

  Tim says of my career, “That’s an okay step.”

  J sends me photos of the mice he works with.

  Something for your not-diary, he texts.

  The cutest photo is of a little brown one sitting inside a bottle cap, tiny nose tucked into his chest, looking as though he’s fallen asleep.

  I text back: Please don’t tell me he’s dead.

  No. It’s just knocked out.

  It’s going to die later today though, he adds, with a crying-face emoji.

  I don’t ask who is going to do the killing. I know it is him.

  Every day I check the forums where soon-to-be graduate students post updates on the schools from which they’ve heard back. I trawl the archives for the last five years to estimate when the Bay Area and New York City schools will respond to J, and every hour (or less) I reload to see if somebody has posted an interview invite for this year. If he hasn’t gotten one, a rejection is inevitable.

  “Don’t tell me,” he says. “I don’t want to know. I want to have a healthy day-to-day life.”

  “This isn’t unhealthy,” I say. “I just want to know as much as I can about what’s likely to happen in the future. Like here, it says that the UCSF program sent—”

  “No, don’t tell me. I’ll just wait until I get the official email.”

  “Fine,” I say, and strike through UCSF on the spreadsheet.

  J sulks in the kitchen.

  As long as I’ve known them, my parents have bought lottery tickets. I don’t. Then, at least, I am completely certain I will not win. The certainty is more manageable for me than the cycle of hoping/not knowing and losing and hoping/not knowing and losing. The poor man’s tax, I’ve heard it called. Or worse, the stupid tax. But what the people who say that don’t understand is: when in all aspects of life the odds are entirely against you, it can be worth paying for even a tiny increase in hope.

  Many women are addicted to online shopping. One editor spends hours browsing clothing sites and adds item after item into her various shopping carts—shoes from Zappos, blouses from Madewell, dresses from Nordstrom, jewelry from various indie artisanal designers on Etsy, bath products from Lush, paintings and vases from One Kings Lane—until they are full of everything she wants to buy. Then she exits out of the tabs one by one, click, click, click, goodbye goods. “It makes me feel like I shopped without having spent any money,” she says.

  The challenge arises when the sites save the items in her cart after she’s closed the tabs, those damn cookies, and what’s worse is when they send her emails telling her she “left something behind . . .” or to “take another look!” so that when she returns, she’s reminded of the many things she had previously wanted and feels reinvigorated by that wanting, thus purchasing said items after all.

  J receives his first acceptance, from UC Riverside, and is soon after invited to interviews in Pittsburgh, Nashville, Davis, and Ithaca. We celebrate by going to dinner at the brewery down the street. He drinks several beers and smiles all night.

  “I feel like I can finally breathe,” he says. “Are you upset, though?”

  “Huh, why? I’m really happy for you. Those schools are good!”

  “But there aren’t any here or in New York City.”

  “It’s not the most ideal situation, but whatever. It feels good to know, at least. We’ll figure it out.” I hold up my glass. “Next stop, one of those places!”

  I call my dad in China to tell him the news. He
asks whether I’ve told my bosses. I say no, I don’t want to jeopardize my raise—assuming somebody is considering it—or my job for that matter, by telling them I’m leaving when I don’t even know where yet, and it’s still not for a while.

  HIM: You have to learn how to negotiate. Be firm. These people respect that.

  ME: What people?

  HIM: The white men. You go in there and tell them your dad knew Bloomberg, back in the seventies. They all want to be Bloomberg. You tell them that your dad is making some calls to get you a job with Bloomberg. See what they say.

  ME: No, I’m not going to do that.

  HIM: Just as a joke! See how they respond. They’ll be impressed, I’m telling you. You have to know how to handle these people.

  ME: No, Daddy!

  HIM: I really did meet Bloomberg. I have some friends. I can make the calls. You just tell me when.

  ME: No, seriously. It won’t help anyway. They just keep saying wait.

  HIM: When was the last time you talked to them? Did they say when exactly they’re getting back to you about this raise?

  ME: No.

  HIM: Did I ever tell you when I was working for my buddy Ken Lansing at the camera store, this was in New York, nineteen seventy . . . six, I think, no, nineteen seventy-five, so I was twenty-six, around your age. I told him, ‘Look, Ken, I’m not taking less than thirty dollars an hour. I’ve been here six months and already I sell the most cameras. The customers love me. I’m your best salesman. I’m not taking anything less. If you don’t pay me what I deserve, forget about it. I’m outta here,’ that’s how I said it. Fuggedaboudit, like the Italian New Yorkers. You know what he said? He said, ‘Okay, you got a point. I’ll pay you what you’re asking.’ He paid me thirty dollars an hour after that, plus commission. Yep. Yep, your father was doing well back then. You’re how old now? Twenty-five, right, but twenty-six according to Chinese lunar year, which means you’re twenty-seven soon, so almost thirty. How much are you making an hour right now?

  ME: Definitely less. Like way less.