Back in the car, we talk shit. The activity monitor is ridiculous. We are only covering it because it has made money, and that money is funding an illusion. Shouldn’t we be doing something more important, not just telling people to buy, buy, buy, fueling the capitalist machine? Then her car makes a strange rumbling sound somewhere in the rear. The passenger-side window no longer rolls up.
“We might break down, but that would be a good excuse not to go back to the office,” she says. “Then again, I really need the money to get this shitbox fixed.”
J designed and built a bike for my body, my exact height, the reach of my legs. He got it powder coated a deep turquoise, put on particular wheels for smooth, comfortable road riding, and attached a strong light to the handlebar. I am, however, very scared of biking in the city. A week hardly passes before the local blogs post another two-paragraph news piece detailing the cross streets of the latest accident or fatality, the victim’s name, a grainy photo of the scene from some corner store’s camera. I will only bike if he’s there guiding me. We ride down Judah to Ocean Beach and I don’t hit or get hit by a car. It feels good. My legs pumping, then the coasting, how easy it is to glide together, slow enough to look around, fast enough to have the sense of efficient movement. I do nearly crash after getting my front wheel stuck in the Muni light-rail tracks. J comes hurrying back to help. Ride more off to the side, he says, waving his hand. Behind me.
Heart beating fast, I follow his path.
“It’s a new era in China,” my dad says on the phone. “New president. This guy cleaned house. He was doing that for months. Anyone corrupt, or anyone he didn’t like—out. He’s consolidating his power. Let’s see what he can do with it.”
“Sounds like my workplace,” I say.
“What’s going on at your work is small fish,” he says. “This is on a much grander scale.” He talks some more about political movements in China, but I only half listen, scrolling through Facebook and Twitter as he talks.
“Okay, that’s that,” he says. “Second on the list. Do you know which U.S. president was the first to visit China while he was president?”
“No, who?”
“You don’t know? You have all these gizmos and gadgets, you should use them to learn. Know history, that’s the most important—”
I look it up on my phone as he talks. “It was Nixon.”
“Exactly. He messed up big time. But what he did for U.S.-China relations, that’s why I like him. So that’s that. What’s new with you?”
“Nothing, nothing at all.”
“Still no news, huh? Did you do what I told you? Bloomberg is on the line.”
“No. Not yet.”
When it comes to our country’s political drama, J is much better versed than I am. Did you hear that blah blah blah said blah blah blah’s platform on blah blah is totally blah blah blah? That’s what I hear. I shake my head. No, wow, huh. Sometimes I think that I need to be more interested in what the powerful people are saying about the other powerful people. Then I look in the mirror and shrug. Statistically, it’s very unlikely that I’ll ever become a powerful person, so why bother?
J says if we move somewhere cheap, then my current salary plus the lower cost of living will be the equivalent to, or maybe even more than, if we remained in San Francisco and I got a raise.
“Or I can just say, ‘Fuck you guys, I’m leaving and I’m not going to work for you anymore unless you pay me better and value me,’” I say. “Worst thing that happens is they say no, and then I’ll be free of them.”
“Then what?”
“Then I find another job.”
“Do you really want that, though?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know.”
“Maybe it’s because you’re hanging out with people who hate their jobs. Maybe you should just listen to Tim. He sounds like he knows what’s going on.”
“Tim’s on another level. And it’s not like they hate their jobs. They just have realistic, somewhat cynical outlooks on the whole thing. I’m naturally attracted to that. They’re the most interesting kind of people.”
“Yeah, well, Jasmine’s more than cynical. She’s crazy.”
“No, she’s not,” I say. “She’s just really opinionated.”
“Crazy opinionated,” he says.
“Don’t,” I say. “You don’t really know her. And you don’t know what it’s like to be in that place every day, where all these old white men sit in their fancy offices and boss everyone around, and you’re so fucking underpaid and underappreciated and nobody gives a shit about you. You don’t even think what that editor said is that big of a deal! And you think Jasmine’s the crazy one?”
“I never said I didn’t think it was a big deal,” he says, slower. Sometimes I imagine he treats my outbursts like he does the angry mice he works with. With care, with gloves.
“Well, you didn’t say you thought it was, either. You probably think it’s great that he didn’t lose his job over a little mistake.”
He looks at me like he doesn’t know me. I sense it, too, that I am channeling somebody else, that I am recycling or regurgitating somebody else’s words as my own—as my own pain—and directing it toward him, as representative of someone or something else. But is it not all connected?
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I agree you’re underpaid. I know that’s stressful. And I think what the managing editor said is wrong.”
I look out the window of the car, at the passing pastel houses as we head up the hill back to our own pastel yellow home. The tower. The sand.
“I know,” I say. “Sorry for yelling. And anyway, he’s losing his job after all.”
Kevin messages me in Parley: Can you meet in the kitchen?
How does the time pass? We’ve never spoken for this long, but misery loves company, as it’s put, and he’s just gotten let go. He says that management told him he wasn’t a fit culturally. Culturally, he repeats. He says a buddy of his at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists said it’s enough to make an official complaint against the publication. But to whom is the complaint made? An association that has no control over what a private company can and cannot do? And will it get him his job back? Will he have to hire a lawyer? Culturally! He can’t believe it.
“I’m thinking of leaving journalism for good,” he says. “Work for a nonprofit or go back to school. Everyone says journalism is dying anyway. It’s toxic. I’ve always wanted to get a Ph.D. in history or English.”
“Nooooo.”
“Isn’t that what your boyfriend’s doing?”
“Biology, not the same. I mean, I’m not saying it’s not a good idea, only that there might be better ones, like trying to find another job.”
Kevin looks mournfully at his hands, all positivity drained from him. So this is what he really looks like, I think, and for a moment, I find him attractive.
“At least they’re giving me ten weeks’ severance, which is like fifteen K, so that plus my savings, I can survive for at least six months if I move out to a cheaper place. The Sunset’s cheap, right? Do you know of any apartment openings? Maybe this is a blessing. I don’t have any responsibilities. I’ve always wanted to write a book. I can do that in the meantime,” he says. Some light returns to his eyes. “Or I can learn a new language. And yeah, maybe I really will go back to school. Anything’s possible! I’ll show them.”
“That sounds great!”
“We’ll have to stay in touch.”
“For sure!”
Afterward, I hurry back to my desk and calculate Kevin’s yearly income. He makes—no, made—about double my salary. I tell Tim. His eyebrows jump up above the frames of his glasses.
“Holy shit,” he says. “It makes even more sense why they let him go.”
“Is that the only reason I’m here?” I say. I rest my head on my desk and close my eyes. “Because I’m cheap labor?”
Tim rolls over to my side of the desk and pats me awkwardly on the shoulder. “No, no,
no, no.”
A list of all the things I could do with an extra $15,000: Pay off nearly all of my remaining student loans. Pay my half of the rent and utilities for seventeen months. Pay my mom’s rent, so she doesn’t need to have the student renter. (“But I like the company,” she says. “It’s lonely without you guys here.”) Visit my dad, no problem. Buy all of my brother’s and sister’s textbooks and school crap for the next three years. Buy J seven new fancy mountain bikes—ha ha, no, I wouldn’t do that.
“So Tim was right and you don’t have to worry,” J says when I call him from the alley behind the office. He has left me again, this time for an interview in Ithaca, some below-freezing cold place in upstate New York.
It’s true. All it might take is a shift in perspective, a state of mind, to allow a situation fresh air. But this is harder done for the person in it than said by someone outside.
And each day another set of people goes. The rest of us hold on tight.
Every day, I Gchat with my mom while at work. Today, she writes, What can you do? That’s the job you chose.
I start talking to other writers about how much Kevin got paid versus how much I got paid versus hey do you want to tell me what you get paid? Some of them happily do and some do not. One woman tells me she thinks contractors tend to have higher salaries than full-time employees to make up for the lack of benefits. When I tell her that Kevin was FTE and I am a contractor, all she says is, Oh, I see. Are you FTE? I ask. She avoids eye contact. She fusses with her hair. I can tell she is deeply uncomfortable with my questions. I don’t care. I feel like I’ve shed a layer of tact and social sensitivity, and underneath is all rough, abrasive matter. I ask again. She says things like, she doesn’t know who makes these rules. It doesn’t make sense. She’s sorry. Was there anything she could do to help? Could she take me out to lunch?
Jasmine rages about the layoffs, especially Kevin’s. She says it’s very likely Mo will soon go, too. Not like he’ll have any trouble finding a job—every other job listing is for a community manager these days. That’s why she’s been running the publication’s Tumblr, so she can put social media experience on her résumé. The hustle never ends. Doesn’t matter that any teenager on the street knows how to post pictures online. Not that we need to really worry. We won’t get fired. Nope. That wouldn’t be a good look for the publication. Not a good look at all. The only two women of color in a room so devoid of women of any kind. And two Chinese girls, as if that’s good enough. Ha ha. We’re lucky now, aren’t we? So fucking lucky.
I point out to Jasmine that when she was in charge of hiring a new photographer, she hired another white man.
She is silent, smoking.
“Yeah, I regret that,” she says. She lights another cigarette. “Fuck dating white guys.”
An editor comes to talk to us about the old days when he worked as a newspaper reporter. He wants to teach us a lesson about deadlines. “Back when I was at the Chronicle they’d ask me for six inches of copy on something that wasn’t even on my beat, something I knew nothing about, like new Muni regulations because the transportation reporter was out, or some housing bill, because the housing guy was out. And they’d ask for it in twenty minutes, so they could get it in the morning paper. The printer had a schedule, you know? And you know what I’d do? I’d give it to them in eighteen minutes.”
Tim and I sit there, me staring, him shaking his foot incessantly.
The editor goes on about how news reporters these days don’t understand how easy they have it with web. How deadlines matter to fewer and fewer of us. How back in the day reporters hit the streets, talked to real people, didn’t just sit at their desks silently sending emails.
Then the editor pauses. “Why do you look like that?” he says to me.
“Oh, that’s her death stare,” says Tim. “That’s when you don’t want to mess with her. She’s scarier than she looks.”
“What?” I say. “No, I was just zoning out.”
The editor laughs and throws his hands up. “Okay, just don’t kill me.” It is 3:30 P.M. by the time he leaves, tapping his watch to remind us of the 4 P.M. deadline.
I glare at Tim.
“Don’t worry. Guys like him will be irrelevant in no time.” Everything he says these days is ominous, as though he is an office fortune-teller.
At the ceremonial groundbreaking of the Transbay Tower (later to be known as Salesforce Tower), architect Cesar Pelli says, “We have designed a tower appropriate for the city. The tower will be svelte but dynamic, elegant, and very gracious. The gateway to the city and the tallest building in the city side by side. It’s a fabulous combination.”
“When this transit tower is complete it will have the impact of transforming the city skyline with the tallest structure west of the Mississippi,” says Mayor Edwin Lee.
He calls it “a place for innovation and inspiration.”
I hear someone in the office say, “San Francisco is going to the bros.”
J gets accepted to Cornell in Ithaca, New York. It feels like winning the lottery.
“Let’s go,” I say.
“Are you sure? Even though you’ve never been?”
He had only good things to say about the place, it is the best school for him, so yes. “Absolutely,” I say. “Let’s get out of here.”
It is a huge relief to stop waiting on this one decision.
We look up housing in Ithaca, click through images of two- and even three-bedroom apartments and houses. We envision living someplace close to a waterfall. “You can have your own office,” says J. “We can go on hikes all summer,” I say. Everything will be so cheap! We’ll get a dog! And a cat! Our future begins to take shape in our collective imagination, and we are as excited as children with new toys.
Every round of layoffs calls for an all-hands meeting in the cafeteria, and at this one, the new EIC gives a speech about how we are reshaping the website into something better, something indispensable to our readers, and how each of us is an important piece to the puzzle of making this happen. Occasionally the EIC calls out individuals for praise, to inflate ever-shrinking morale. Today, he references a story about an in-depth look at a company’s interface redesign, a story I wrote.
“And this is the type of story that will get us recognized as the best tech publication in the field,” he says. “Really good work, umm . . . yes, good work!”
The EIC does not remember my name, or worse, does not know me at all. People look around, trying to figure out who wrote the story. Tim waves at me to say something. I slide down in my seat and refuse to look up.
“It’s okay,” Tim tells me afterward. “Other editors know you wrote that story.”
“So is now the time to tell somebody I’m moving to Ithaca?”
“Where is that?”
“Upstate New York.”
He shakes his head. No. No. No. No.
The rich white woman whom I previously worked for had a husband who was a venture capitalist, a term I’d never heard before I met her, and which she could not explain. She did, however, keep abreast of the Silicon Valley social scene. Mark Zuckerberg and his girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, got engaged, she told me one day as I organized her closets. She said that she had looked up Priscilla and had very quickly determined that I was much prettier. So much prettier that Mark Zuckerberg should, in fact, be marrying me, not Priscilla, who looked to be a bit on the bigger side, nearly as tall and certainly as thick as Zuckerberg himself. Zuckerberg might be a smaller-than-average man, though—it was hard to tell from the photos—but either way, it would not be a problem for me, since I was a small, cute woman, she continued. She had the misconception that Priscilla was an opportunistic, vengeful vixen, from the way the Asian woman had been characterized in the movie The Social Network. Honestly, she had been a bit surprised when she finally saw Priscilla’s photo and learned of her successful background—fluent in many languages, first in her family to graduate from college, medical school at UCSF.
&n
bsp; “You two share so many qualities, but of course you’re much prettier,” she repeated.
I did not know which of her comments was most important to address. I was fluent in one language. I was the first in my immediate family to graduate from college, but I was nowhere near medical school. What exactly was she trying to say? I had spent the duration of her speech focused on managing my facial expression, on not moving any muscle in any direction. To look as blank and still as possible. I coughed and apologized. I said I didn’t think the woman in the movie was meant to be a portrayal of Priscilla, specifically, since the character did not even date Mark Zuckerberg’s character, but that I had found it nonetheless shallow, annoying, and stereotypical.
“Yes, that’s it! These men don’t understand anything,” she said. “Now I only wish there was a way for you to meet Mark Zuckerberg before they get married.”
I reminded her that I had a boyfriend.
“Oh, sweetie, you don’t know if that’s going to last.”
I went back to organizing one of her large walk-in closets, intent on not ripping her things into small pieces. And to a certain extent, it worked. I continued to work for her for months after. We drank tea together. She ordered me expensive lunches every day. She called me her friend. When I left, she hired another Asian girl to replace me.
I’ve seen Mark Zuckerberg a few times in person, but never close enough to examine the pores in his skin or the pupils of his eyes, so I’m not certain he has either. Two times he’s been on a stage shilling a groundbreaking new product of Facebook’s, usually clapping and looking wide-eyed and lost, a sad, wild animal. One time he was in his glass cage corner office, which made him appear to be on view for the Facebook employees to walk by and admire, a creature whose presence would inspire. I asked my PR guide of the day if we could get closer to the office to see what he was up to and she said sure. There was Zuckerberg, sitting at his desk, on his computer, typing. He looked calm. He didn’t notice his new audience. I wanted to approach the glass, to knock on it and wave, to startle him into that familiar frightened look, but my PR guide took me by the shoulders and said we had to get to a meeting with some lesser animal who was going to tell me about another groundbreaking new product. As we walked away, I looked back to catch a last glimpse of the Zuck in his natural habitat.
Days of Distraction Page 7