Ethan
As we wade through the overgrown vegetation, downed trees, and old growth across the muddy terrain, my pulse continues to throb in my temple once I wrap up my summary of yesterday’s disastrous meeting.
A scrum call should not end with us going back and forth for two hours over how to fill out a spreadsheet.
Staring ahead at the mossy pines and larch trees surrounding us, I mutter, “I’m not looking forward to the conference. I don’t think I’m going to be able to handle standing in the same room with her, let alone work with her.”
It’s not three days out of my schedule, as I had assumed. It’s five. We’re expected to check into the hotel on Tuesday night and check out Sunday afternoon, from what Ed has revealed during yesterday’s update meeting.
“Look on the bright side,” Aaron says. “It’s an all-expense-paid trip.” He pauses for a moment. “You can also bring me back plenty of lobster rolls.”
“We have lobster rolls here,” I remind him, and he waffles his hand with a disbelieving scoff. “I don’t need to fly to the other side of the country to pick you up some lobster rolls.”
“Even if it’s on the company dime?”
In answer, I narrow my eyes.
“And,” he goes on, “you can finally put a face with Barbie once and for all.”
“Or you can finally admit she’s not real,” I say, and he snorts as we halt our steps.
Just a few yards up ahead, there’s a trail washout.
It’s the second one we’ve stumbled across on our half-hour hike so far, and, by the look of it, it’s not advisable to trek through.
“Admit it. She’s an AI bot you guys are trying to deploy company-wide by the end of the year to cut costs, and because I’m running QA, I’m the sucker who has to deal with her head-on. ”
“She’s not a bot.”
“She’s not real,” I insist. “Look me in the eye and tell me you believe there’s a woman out there named Barbie Ho.”
It’s a dumb question to ask when my best friend wholeheartedly believes that the Kraken exists, but I refuse to accept the idea that I’m the only person on this green earth who thinks a name like that is, without a doubt, absurd.
Aaron turns on his feet, looks steadily into my eyes, and claps his hand on my shoulder. “You report to Ed Flanders.”
A groan heaves from the depths of my chest. “Either I’m the guinea pig suckered into working with the most stubborn, aggravating AI bot you guys are secretly developing,” I begin. “Or you tricked me into signing my soul away when you mentioned an opening at your job—”
“In a way, aren’t all corporate jobs soul-crushing to a certain extent?” he muses, stroking his jaw.
“—and I've been living in some fucked-up nightmare of a simulation for two years now,” I continue, “where Barbie will fight me over LLCs, Casper will soon mess with my thermostat every night, and Winnie the Pooh inevitably steals my job with the next round of layoffs.”
“Barbie is real.”
“She’s from Malibu.”
“Which is a real place,” Aaron hedges, “unlike Narnia, Atlantis, or the North Pole.”
“The fuck do you mean, the North Pole?” I stare incredulously at him for a taut moment. Only birdsong can be heard in the far distance. “The North Pole’s real.”
Something like sympathy flits across his features. “Buddy, you’re turning thirty-one. It’s time to accept the fact that Santa isn’t real.”
“Oh, but the fucking Kraken is?”
“Was,” Aaron says. “I heard from a friend—”
“Was it Conspiracy Sam?”
“All I’m saying is that the Kraken was real until—” He holds up a finger when he sees the look on my face. “Okay, where’s your sense of whimsy—”
“Barb is not real,” I say. “This is some weird joke you guys are playing on me. I’m going to fly out to South Carolina in July and find out Barb is actually Ed with a voice disguiser.”
Aaron lifts a brow. “Your mom is right. You do need a girlfriend.” He pauses. “Or a dog. A dog would make a better hiking buddy than me.”
“You don’t have to tag along—”
“Aw, man, I’m not going to let you go by yourself. You know that.” His mouth curls. “If your ass gets eaten by a bear, who’s gonna be there and make it less awkward for me when I order seven baskets of buffalo wings during happy hour?”
“It’s still just as awkward with me there.” I shake my head as he grins harder at me. “And you inhale nine baskets in one go.”
“All I’m saying is that this trip might be good for you,” he says. “You might meet a nice local girl there”—his finger goes up again—“and rediscover what it’s like to have fun.”
“I like to have fun.”
“How,” he says, spanning his hand toward the fir trees beside us, “is this fun?”
“It’s good exercise. Something to help burn off the nine baskets of wings you plow through,” I deadpan. “And you know this helps me clear my head.”
Heavy skepticism washes over his face. “Man, your head hasn’t been cleared in months. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you this stressed.”
I open my mouth to object, but he’s not wrong. Leading the QA team has done nothing but give me my first gray hair a few months into working at Green Checks, a permanent increase in my blood pressure, and tension in my entire body that never seems to go away until I clock out for the weekend.
When I first started at the company, the QA team had seven people working for me. We’re down to four. Not because they quit on me, but because they’ve been fired after Malibu Barbie wouldn’t stop erroring them on so-called issues our clients never cared about in the first place.
She looks for problems that don’t exist, and then I’m saddled with more work as I have to put out a bunch of fires when Ed comes for me and asks why my team’s screwing up so much by ignoring all the scenarios we could have tested for.
If my team keeps shrinking, it’s going to become impossible for us to get anything done. We’re barely scraping by as it is. Everyone’s doing twice as many assignments, they’re all burning out, and morale is so low that the bar is in the pits of hell.
“Okay,” I say finally. “For the rest of this weekend, I’ll stop talking about work, thinking about work—”
As if on cue, my phone buzzes in my pocket.
“Don’t answer anything from work?” Aaron tries and groans a split second later. “It’s your day off.”
“Ed wouldn’t reach out unless there’s an emergency.”
“It’s. Your. Day. Off,” he repeats. “And we’re in the middle of a forest. Tell him that Workaholic Ethan can’t come to the phone right now because he’s becoming one with nature or something. He’ll understand.”
“I’m not a workaholic,” I say, even though we both know I am. To a certain extent. My student loans were finally paid off earlier in December, but I’ve got a house I’m trying to pay off.
“Let me see what it is,” I say, and the moment I glimpse at my screen, a weary sigh escapes me. “Fuck. I need to go.”
The overtime pay is good, I remind myself.
I’m being paid an obscene amount of money just to sit at my desk.
It’s not like I had better things to do on a Saturday afternoon besides watching Aaron inhale an inhuman amount of chicken tenders drowned in a disgusting mixture of ranch, thousand island dressing, curry ketchup, and yuzu sauce.
“So, Carter,” Barbie says, and her vocal fry is out in full force as she drags out each syllable. “What’s going to happen if this is still down on Monday?”
“Then it’s still down on Monday.”
“I’m serious,” she hisses.
“My team’s working on it,” I grunt, and I look at her icon for a split second. Unlike everyone else employed at Green Checks Insurance, Barbie is the only one who still hasn’t uploaded a picture. Her default icon is just her initials. BH.
Even though it’s a joke, it really gives credence to my Barbie is an AI bot theory.
Some of my other evidence includes our work emails—mine is EtCarter@greenchecks, Aaron’s is AaKirby@greenchecks, and her handle is literally just Barbie@greenchecks—along with her lack of an online presence for someone who supposedly is from sunny, sunny California.
Aaron allegedly found her online before she deleted her account last year, but there were only three old photos of an orange tabby posted on it, and they were all tagged to this one semi-popular account that’s still running.
Some of the images of that cat have been posted during our scrum calls, town halls, and the infamous four-hour meeting where Barbie wouldn’t stop picking apart every little step my team provided hers on a liability report.
The SOP for the liability report would be three hundred pages instead of its current seventy if I hadn’t stepped in and reminded her that we don’t need to document every tab and link provided on the software used.
Or that we can’t create a standard on how a policyholder’s address is keyed because we can only go by how the agent submitted it.
Besides, there’s no way she could post pictures of a cat with ridiculous hats while simultaneously reaming my team over every little detail under a microscopic lens. Not unless she’s a bot.
“You don’t have to be here,” I say, and she scoffs. “It’s Saturday. My team will have it handled.”
“Are you sure?” she asks sweetly. “Ed called me to come in after he couldn’t reach you—”
“I was in an area with poor reception,” I say, and my eyes narrow at her icon when her mic picks up the hell she coughs under her breath. “But I am here now. I’ll try to see why it’s down.”
“As long as this impacts my team’s work,” she interjects, “I’ll stick around. Just in case you need a second set of eyes.”
“It’s fine. I’m sure you have better things to do, given that it’s Saturday—”
“Don’t worry about it,” she cuts me off. “I just want to have the assurance that everything is operational, so my team’s not blindsided come Monday when none of the daily production reports have reached our inbox. My team can’t do their jobs if your team can’t do yours.”
The muscle in my jaw goes taut as I glare out my window. “The reports will be in your inbox by the time you sign in on Monday.”
“Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves,” she says. “There have always been some… performance issues on your end.”
My gaze hardens. “My team does not have any performance issues.”
“There have been so many delayed reports in the past few months,” she says matter-of-factly. “I’m sure you’re used to leaving people unsatisfied—”
“Should I start recording this call?” I warn, because her not-so-subtle digs aren’t as cute as she thinks they are. Things go over Ed’s head all the time, but they don’t go over mine.
“—with all of your botched reports,” she goes on. “However, I believe in only sending out reports of the highest standard to business. And in a timely fashion, too.”
“Botched reports?” I echo.
“Like the times you guys would send us empty spreadsheets. Or how you guys would send the reports with the wrong data every Wednesday, without fail, despite me reporting it back to you every time,” she supplies.
“Don’t even get me started on the time you guys sent my team a report of every audit completed seven years ago—”
“I can assure you that my team isn’t sending you botched reports on purpose.” My words are a low growl. “None of the incidents you’ve listed are issues any longer. If you pay attention to the status updates Help Desk sends out.”
She makes a little huffing sound. “You guys sent us a botched report last week.”
I almost set my headset down. Instead, I press my fingers to my temple.
The overtime pay is good. Think about Mom and Lara. I breathe through my nose. Mom’s house isn’t going to pay for itself.
“They were not botched,” I say flatly. “Does your team need a refresher on how to filter a spreadsheet?”
“Of course not,” she clips. “My team wouldn’t have any trouble filtering your report if your team hadn’t formatted the spreadsheet so weirdly in the first place.” She pauses for a beat. “Does your team need a refresher course on how to format a spreadsheet properly?”
“Not at all,” I say flatly, and I snatch my phone the moment it buzzes with an incoming text, welcoming any reprieve from this ongoing and never-ending insanity.
Aaron: this could be you
Beneath the text, there’s an unappetizing photo of what appears to be fried catfish, mozzarella sticks, and onion rings drenched in at least seven different types of sauce. All on one plate.
I think I’d rather eat whatever that monstrosity is for the rest of my life than experience another Saturday afternoon like this. Especially when Barbie lets out her breathy sigh that roughly translates to: I’m about to ruin this guy’s day.
The urge to send her a captcha test and ask her to select all the street signs is strong, but outmatched by my desire to end this unpleasantry between us as quickly as possible. “I’ll circle back—”
“Carter, do not—”
“—on this later with any updates. We both don’t need to be here. I got this handled. Go enjoy what’s left of your Saturday.” Without giving her a chance to short-circuit on me, I end the call and welcome the few seconds of peace before she starts pinging me repeatedly in the IMs.