Chapter 8
8
I resigned myself to waiting for April, the start of the year’s second quarter, when there’d presumably be another VBB and an opportunity to present a fresh vision to the universe. The failure of my date with Simon had prompted me to reassess my priorities. Going forward, romance with a pilot, or any person, would no longer play a role in my vision. I’d shift my focus to professional success, the acquisition of money to fund more frequent flights, hastening my marriage to whichever fine plane would choose me, and maximizing my pleasure in the meantime.
With this new resolve in place, I committed myself to my work in H as far as I knew, the offender remained at large.
“So you’ve all heard by now that a manager from the parent company will be visiting our site tomorrow,” Scott said, his beady eyes gleaming. “I hope you’re aware that our site pays the highest wages of any moderation facility in the world. Christa and I have been working our butts off to optimize our center’s working conditions. So if anyone has a problem with anything— anything at all—I invite you to share it with me, or Christa, directly.”
We were silent a moment. Then Sheila, an older woman who worked in the Spam vertical, raised her hand.
“Do we know yet who vandalized the office?” she said.
“Yeah, do we have to worry about someone coming back with a gun?” Todd added.
“We’ve identified the perpetrator and we are dealing with them through legal channels,” Scott said. “We can’t disclose any more information at this time.”
Christa stepped forward, grinning. “Y’all are perfectly safe here,” she said. “We’re looking into hiring security, and everyone will be required to wear their ID lanyards at all times.” This elicited a grumble from the crowd. We hated the lanyards.
“Dave is aware of the challenges our site faces,” Christa continued, “and he’s looking forward to giving our rockstar moderators everything y’all need. In that spirit, we hope you’ll give him your one-thousand-percent honest feedback tomorrow!”
Christa went on to remind us of the parent company’s partnership with a mental health app, through which we were entitled to a fifteen percent discount on virtual therapy.
“Okay, team,” Scott said, affecting the demeanor of a high school football coach. “That’s it. Eat the dang bagels.”
I took an everything bagel, smeared it with cream cheese, and ate the halves at my desk, crumbs dropping into the crevices of my keyboard and making certain keys stick, so that for the rest of the day, my commentary was cluttered with extra t ’s.
After work, Karina and I decamped to the sushi place to process the day’s events. She’d talked to Scott after the meeting, and he’d told her the confidential details of what we’d begun referring to as “the incident.” Karina and Scott had a special friendship that I’d initially assumed was rooted in Scott’s sexual desire for Karina, but when I’d mentioned this, Karina had laughed and informed me that Scott preferred men.
“Apparently it was Santiago,” Karina said. “Remember him from the holiday party? Tall, skinny guy with bags under his eyes.”
“Oh yeah. He was in Violence, wasn’t he?” At the holiday party, we’d met a few of the night-shift workers for the first time. Santiago wore an oversized wool sweater and glowered at us over the cheese plate. He attempted to tell us a riddle about a well with no bottom but forgot the solution partway through.
“Turns out he’s a real nut,” Karina said. “He waited until everyone from the night shift left, then took a dump on Tonya’s keyboard, smashed some monitors, and stole the sunset painting from the wellness room.”
“What a monster,” I said, imagining the lovely painting discarded beneath an overpass. “So they arrested him?”
“They want to, but he’s disappeared.” Karina shuddered. “He’s still out there, somewhere. Scott says he won’t come back, but how could he know that?”
Our gyoza arrived. We ate them quietly, contemplating possible scenarios. I had a vision of Santiago stalking a desolate landscape in his giant wool sweater.
“Did Tonya quit?” I asked, dipping a gyoza in sauce.
Karina shrugged. “She missed Kay’s, anyway.” Tonya had often regaled us with stories from her former job, collecting debts on behalf of the Kay jewelry corporation.
“What do you know about this David Kinney guy?” I said.
“Dave.” Karina popped a gyoza in her mouth, not bothering with the sauce. “I only met him one time, when they were setting up the wellness room.”
Karina laid her chopsticks on a stand she’d made from their paper wrapper. On her phone, she showed me Dave’s LinkedIn profile. His photo revealed him to be a tall, slim, middle-aged man, most resembling the 757-300, whose long, thin shape had earned him the nickname “flying pencil.” Dave was clad in a gray suit, sans tie, and leaned against a brick wall bathed in golden-hour sunlight, laughing at someone to the side of the camera.
“He looks intimidating,” I said.
“You think?” She examined his picture again. “Nah. He’s a lame guy who’s desperate for people to like him. He founded a clean energy company a few years back, but it went under, so now he’s stuck with us.”
Still, I was nervous for Dave’s visit. I enjoyed the respectability conferred by office work. I was afraid Dave would sniff out my latent perversity and place me in the same category as Santiago. With his corporate intuition, he’d sense I was a liability, and I’d have to go back to working at Subway.
“Don’t sweat it,” Karina said, sensing my nervousness. “They have to make a show of investigating, but they don’t want to find any real problems. We say everything’s fine and Dave goes away and Christa buys us more shitty snacks from Costco.”
I hoped Karina was right. I would also appreciate more egg rolls, ahead of the scheduled replenishing, even if they were bought with my complicity.
—
The next day, I dressed carefully in the same outfit I’d interviewed in: a striped button-down shirt from H&M, black trousers from Target, and a marled gray cardigan that reached almost to my knees. I always felt more confident with the shape of my buttocks obscured.
When I reached the exterior row, Karina was already seated at her terminal, staring glassy-eyed into the Violence queue. For once, everyone had arrived on time, and the moderation floor thrummed with quiet anticipation. The interior row dwellers had risen to the occasion. The young men of the Porn and Spam verticals had a damp, startled look about them, like freshly bathed dogs. There was a tautness in the room, perhaps owing to the aggregated energy of our tensed core muscles and clenched sphincters. It was fortunate that Dave’s visit was scheduled for 10:00 a.m. , as I doubted we could maintain our performance past lunchtime. Christa and Scott flitted around the moderation floor, inspecting us. Christa straightened the mouse pads of unused terminals. Scott pondered a framed photograph on the wall, a snowy mountaintop awash in pink light. All of the office’s artwork had been chosen, I assumed, for its benignity, so as not to trigger mental breakdowns among the already fragile crew. Maybe Scott wondered if the mountaintop evoked suicide, as all art does if one is thinking constantly of the act. He must have deemed it acceptable, as he left it undisturbed.
Right at ten o’clock, Christa ran out the door and returned moments later with Dave, as though he were a pizza she’d ordered for delivery. Through my headphones, I couldn’t make out what Christa murmured to Dave as she led him down the interior row. I’d had a mental image of the man, from the photo Karina had shown me the night before, but in the flesh he was more impressive than he’d been in his tiny LinkedIn photo. His blond hair had faded to gray, but this made him look distinguished. He wore glasses with translucent frames, and surveyed the space with an air of authority, nodding as Christa detailed our site’s operations. Scott joined them on their circuit, and I noted that Dave was several inches taller than Scott, who himself was not a short man. They made their way down the interior row with agonizing slowness. At last they arrived at the exterior row and stood directly behind me.
“This is Linda,” Christa whispered, as if identifying a zoo animal belonging to an introverted species. I felt paralyzed, unsure whether I should turn and greet Dave or pretend to be so immersed in my work that I didn’t notice them looming behind me.
“Pleased to meet you, Linda,” Dave said. The blur of his hand appeared in my periphery, and I shook it, gazing into his nostrils. Seated, my face was positioned at the level of his groin, clad in khaki.
“You, too,” I said.
“Looking forward to chatting,” he said and moved down the row, to my relief. He didn’t greet any other moderators by name, and from this I feared the worst.
An hour later, I joined Dave in the conference room for our one-on-one. Rather than sitting behind the table, he’d positioned two chairs to face each other without obstruction. He sat with rangy confidence, left ankle slung over right knee, and sipped a venti Starbucks. His lanyard dangled down the front of his blue oxford shirt. My eyes darted to the face on his ID card then back to his three-dimensional face, giving me a sense of vertigo.
“So, Linda,” he said, smiling. “What’s your story?”
I’d already resolved to treat this meeting like a police interview. I would admit to only the objective facts of my existence, those already present in my personnel file. “I grew up in Irvine, and now I’m here,” I said.
“Oh, come on. I bet there’s more to it than that.”
I struggled to think of an additional innocuous detail that would satisfy him. “I lived with my brother in Bakersfield for two years,” I said.
“Bako, huh? I’ve never been.”
“You aren’t missing much.”
“How’d you wind up at Acuity?”
“I always wanted to live in San Francisco,” I said, though it would have been more accurate to say I’d wanted to live near SFO. I could never be satisfied, long term, with the offerings of a regional airport. “I saw an ad for the job on Craigslist, so I applied.”
“I moved here for a job, too,” he said, with a wistful expression. “Back in the nineties. Everyone was talking about what was happening out here, with the tech boom. I knew I had to get a piece of the action.” His blue eyes twinkled with nostalgia. “Did you always want to work in tech?”
“Not really,” I said. “I mean, I’ve always enjoyed using the internet.”
I knew I was failing to impress Dave and wished I’d better prepared for our meeting, which felt like an interview for the job I already had. I tried to channel Scott. “I was drawn to Acuity’s mission,” I said. “I’m proud of the work we do in promoting virtual hygiene.”
He smiled with tight lips, and I sensed he thought either I was a fraud or our job was. “Right. Well, Linda, everyone at headquarters is impressed by your metrics. Very impressed.” He reached behind him to take an iPad from the table. He tapped around on its screen, presumably consulting my stats.
“They are?” I said, feigning modesty.
“You’re incredibly efficient. It’s like you were born to be a content moderator.” He laughed. “Sorry. I meant that as a compliment.”
I wondered if he was flattering me to gain a psychological advantage. “I do my best,” I said.
“Moderating comments requires a highly nuanced understanding of cultural context. It’s why the software alone can’t be trusted with the edge cases. I’ve found that some mods have trouble distinguishing between comments that are personally offensive to them versus in violation of the terms of service.”
“The ToS is all that matters,” I said. “My own opinion is irrelevant.”
“Exactly.” He seemed pleased by this, and I was relieved I’d won him over. “Is there anything I can do for you, Linda? I’d like to keep you with us as long as possible.”
I saw a chance to set my new goals in motion. “I’d like to be paid more,” I said.
“Fair enough,” he said, tapping a note on his iPad. He asked if there was anything else he could do for me. I mentioned the cushions in the wellness room needed washing and the yoga ball had gone flat.