Chapter Two
Two
Taskio is spread across five floors in one of the swishy new World Trade buildings, with views stretching out over Manhattan’s Financial District and the Hudson River beyond.
All five floors are carbon copies of one another: enormous, open-plan squares with hundreds of workstations, the walls adorned with meaningless phrases like follow your curious and break the mold spelled out in neon lights.
The office has been designed, at great expense, to inspire creativity and productivity. We even have several fun little breakout spaces where you can go to play guitar, or secretly cry.
This place resembles a fancy high school: there’s a cafeteria, an auditorium for assemblies, and desks for the thousands of employees who work here. There are cliques, and popular kids, and the department heads all feel like teachers—they’re constantly giving you grades.
As a service, Taskio is brilliant in its dumbness; it’s a digital version of the cork board you probably had in your family kitchen growing up.
Using Taskio, you can pin up all your little digital cue cards and sort them into lists, dragging them around between columns that you might label as “to do” and “done,” for example.
As the years have gone by, the software has become ever more powerful and complicated, but the basic principles are the same. You use Taskio to stay organized and productive and on top of your tasks, whatever they may be.
The reason Taskio has achieved global popularity isn’t because it makes you more productive—in fact, exactly the opposite is true.
Meticulously managing your projects using our software is like planning to make a plan; mostly, you could get the task done in the same amount of time it takes you to note down that you intend to do that task.
But by creating elaborate boards for your projects, and assigning deadlines, and tracking timelines, all that work you’re doing that would otherwise be invisible—and therefore meaningless—is suddenly out in the open for everyone to see.
Taskio doesn’t help you be productive. It helps you feel productive. That’s why we make the big bucks.
Thanks to the cookie-cutter layout of the building—and helpful overhead signs pointing you to the different departments, like a techy grocery store—it’s not hard to find Data Strategy.
I don’t know anyone on this team, but after a hasty Google of her name, I can at least remember the department head: an extremely impressive and slightly terrifying woman called Naomi, who gives off real girlboss energy whenever she speaks at a town hall.
Even with fewer workstations on this floor than on my own, the place is deserted.
There’s only one guy here, ensconced behind a truly enormous pair of monitors.
He’s wearing headphones, and so it’s not until I’m nearly right in front of him that he clocks my presence.
When he does, he seems surprised, but also not, as if a total stranger approaching him out of nowhere is the sort of thing that happens to him all the time.
He pulls off his headphones as I come to a halt at the edge of his desk. I wonder, belatedly, if I should have taken the time to freshen up before I got here.
My getup today is what my roommate Sam calls “Hot Steve Jobs,” which is to say a black roll neck paired with a denim maxi skirt.
I had tossed my hair into an extremely sweaty ponytail sometime after getting to Carrie’s office. I itch now to take it back down, but if I did it would no longer be straight, but kinked from the haphazard way I tied it up.
For his part, he looks like every other New York normie who inhabits this city, but slightly better, like a Hollywood A-lister who’s been dressed down to play the role of Average Guy.
He’s in a brown knit hoodie, a beat-up pair of Levi’s, and tennis shoes. He’s also wearing a baseball cap, which he seems a little old for, and his brown hair wings out from underneath it around his neck and ears. Not a look I admire, personally, but to each their own.
His desk, I notice, is cluttered with all kinds of crap: empty coffee mugs, stacks of paper, another hat. And…a mini monster truck toy?
“Heyyy,” I say, dragging the word out while I try and marshal my wits back into order. “I’m looking for Naomi?”
“Evans?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know why I asked that, as if there’s more than one Naomi,” he says, smiling. “She’s still on mat leave.”
Shit. I did not know that.
“Oh. Right.”
“Is there something I can help with?”
“Erm,” I say, my mind whirring. What now? “Do you know who the interim strategy lead is?”
“Perhaps,” he says mysteriously. “May I ask what this is about?”
“Oh, um—I was just coming to introduce myself.” I peer around, looking for someone, anyone else. This guy looks like he has all the time to waste in the world. I need to find a grownup. “I’m the new data strategist.”
He leans back in his chair. Something about his posture calls to mind a cat playing with its kill.
“I wasn’t aware we’d hired a new data strategist.”
“And yet,” I say, drawing an arm down the length of my body with a flourish. “Here I am.”
“Strange,” he muses. “I don’t remember your interview.”
“Probably because you weren’t there.”
“And neither was the department head, from the sounds of things,” he says. “That’s worrying. Are you sure you’re in the right place?”
“Yes.”
“Could you have interviewed over at CoinDot? They’re on the 29th floor. Easy to get confused.”
“I’m sure,” I say, gritting my teeth. “I already work at Taskio. I got reassigned.”
“Ah,” he says. “The layoffs. I’m beginning to understand. What’s your name?”
“Annie. Winstead.”
“Annie Winstead,” he repeats, testing it out. “Well, Annie, if you want to send a copy of your résumé, I’ll make sure the department head gets it.”
“Why would I do that?”
He blinks at me. “So you can apply for the role, I’m presuming.”
“I don’t think that will be necessary. HR already made the transfer.”
“Be that as it may,” he says, “I’m certain you’ll still need to interview.”
“Which I’d be able to do,” I counter, “if you’d point me in the direction of the strategy lead.”
He tilts his head like well, you have me there.
“Tell you what,” he says, “the department head usually does the interviews up in the canteen. Why don’t you head up there and I’ll go find him, tell him to see you up there in five?”
“What are you, like their PA, or something?”
“Definitely ‘or something.’ ”
I huff. I don’t have time for this joker.
“Fine. I’ll wait up there.”
I turn on a heel and storm off without another word.