Chapter Three
LACEY
After a day like today, I could use some inner peace.
I drag Kate to a yoga class with me, even though she says she’d rather go get a drink.
I’m trying to find healthier releases, so instead we bask in a solid hour of active meditation, my brain completely in the back seat.
And then it’s time for savasana, the part at the end where you’re supposed to be in a state of pure peace and relaxation.
Unless you’re me, because all my calm flies out the window the second I’m not wrapping my arms around my legs and balancing on one toe.
I lie there while my brain spirals through all the terrible things that happened today.
The presentation. The elevator. The anxiety of Glenn telling me I’d need to go pitch my idea to Jude, followed by the dread when Jude opted out.
It sounds like a thing you’d do before you fire someone.
The teacher rings her singing bowl to ease us back to the reality I’ve been too stressed to escape, and I sit up and hug my knees for a minute before taking a deep breath. It’s all out of my hands, to some degree. I simply need to accept it.
I turn to tell Kate my new, Zen plan and find her asleep on her mat, mouth open.
“Kate,” I whisper, but she doesn’t respond until I poke her. She wakes with a start.
“Namaste,” I tell her. Everyone else has rolled up their mats and is filing out the door. “I decided I’m surrendering to the startup gods on this whole work situation. Whatever is going to happen, is going to happen.”
Kate looks skeptical. “You’re going to sit back and let the universe unfold?”
I nod. She holds her fingertips to her temple and says, “I see it unfolding a martini and a caprese salad. Grab your shit, we’re going drinking.”
With sweaty hairlines and in yoga clothes, we sit at the bar of the first Italian place we get to in North Beach.
It’s full of tourists and the food is overpriced, but Kate distracts me from my troubles with tales of stupid customers and her terrible dating history.
I tell her I’m sorry I don’t have any great stories to share.
“Because you never have bad dates?”
“I never have any dates,” I say. “I told you last year, work is my boyfriend now.”
She shakes her head. “As you see, work is about as good a boyfriend as that dick Marcus was.”
“He wasn’t so bad.”
She bites her lips closed to keep from disagreeing with me.
Marcus and I were together for three years, and it was really good for the first bit, until he moved to LA for law school.
We stayed together but grew apart; he said he needed to focus on his studies, which turned out to be girls in his study group. And girls not in his study group.
“What if you just found someone to compare him to? You love data. Collect some more.”
I know she’s probably right, but that’s not where my head’s at these days.
“I made a decision that my career comes first right now. I want to accomplish things, I want to establish myself. Glenn’s given me all this opportunity and I need to take advantage of it. Unless I get fired tomorrow.”
“You’re not getting fired. And you know it goes two ways, right? Lettercat is lucky to have you.”
“I know.”
“Fine, so you’re a company girlie right now. Let’s find you a company man. You can make out in the break room when no one’s looking. Anything more will need to happen in the stairwell or the bathroom, though. Open Doors and all.”
I laugh. “As much as I love our team, it’s in the most platonic way possible. It’s slim pickings anyway. Dave’s married and also just, no. The QA guys are my mortal enemies, and your CS boys are all bearded weirdos.”
“It’s true, they are,” she nods sadly. “What about Trevor?”
I retch. “Trevor is despicable. You should have seen his smug face when he got back from his meeting with Jude. Everything I do is wrong, but that nepo-bro can’t stop winning.”
“Come on now.” She pats my hand. “They’re old friends. Trevor’s basically Jude’s hype man. There’s something cute about it.”
I wrinkle my nose and eat all three olives from martini number two’s skewer in one swoop. “Stop ruining my pity party; they’re both the absolute worst. I don’t know what I’m going to do without Glenn there as my buffer. I hope his wife stays pregnant for two years.”
“You’re going to be fine. Think of it as an opportunity to show Jude how amazing you are, close up and personal.” She whispers the last bit seductively.
“Ew,” I say.
“Come on,” she says. “I’m sure he’s only sexually aroused by KPIs, but you can’t tell me the man’s not hot.”
“He’s unkempt.”
She looks at me, concerned, and waves her hand in a little wax-on motion.
“You mean like, down there?”
“Kate!” I throw my plastic skewer at her and the two of us double over in laughter while a vacationing family of four at a table nearby stare.
“Fine,” she says when we recover. “There’s a cutie at this new integration partner you should meet. He told me he’s really hands-on with implementation. Sounds like something that might relieve some of this stress you’re feeling.”
I wake up sore from yoga and cotton-mouthed from martinis, the worst of both worlds. There’s a carafe of water on my nightstand, and Hungover Lacey thanks Tipsy Lacey for being so thoughtful. I push myself up to seated and gulp straight from the carafe (Tipsy didn’t bring a glass).
I weigh my options for the day. On one hand, I could drag myself out of bed, get dressed, take the bus down to the office, and see the people I was humiliated in front of yesterday.
I could then spend the day hiding out at my desk as much as possible to avoid reminding Jude that I exist, that I don’t think highly of him, and that I should be fired.
I’ll also get to listen to Trevor plan his big disrupting nonsense product, the one that pulls Lettercat so far from our loyal and happy customers and plays to the very people they compete with.
Or I can work from home and sit at my little desk/table here in my studio apartment, the one I set up to look and feel exactly like a high-end hotel room.
My bed is resplendent with pillows, a loveseat and swivel chair flank my coffee table, and the palette is neutral but with splashes of color in accessories: a buttercup-yellow vase, magenta pillows, a green tea kettle.
And of course, who needs wall art when I can open my blinds and see San Francisco rolling down to a hazy blue line of the Bay.
On clear days, which do sometimes exist, I can see the Golden Gate Bridge.
Sure, it looks like a little red paperclip from here, but it still counts.
I open Slack on my phone and set my status to “WFH,” then attempt to grab another twenty minutes of sleep. Once my eyes close, my brain promptly replays the elevator scene from the day before, allowing me to marinate in my own cringe.
No, I tell my brain, you’re not in charge here.
I counter by pulling up footage of me championing my team’s efforts in front of our whole company until I’m derailed by someone in the back of the room who finally decided to tune in and have an opinion.
Then I see Glenn, later on, telling me I should pull my proposal together—nothing polished needed—so I can give Jude a look at the big idea I’ve been working on.
I spent an hour reviewing the data, editing the mockups, prepping to wow him despite the earlier incident. Incidents.
Until Trevor came back gloating over his success, and a few minutes later Glenn came over to my desk.
“You don’t need to worry about presenting to Jude,” he said. “Sorry for the false alarm.”
I fake smiled and said, “No problem,” then turned back to my computer to pointedly close my spreadsheets, my slide deck, my clickable prototype.
“For what it’s worth, I think it’s a great idea. We’ll get to it, just got to get over this revenue hump first.” Glenn told me.
“Mmmhmmm,” I said, not turning around. I don’t cry at work, but sometimes it’s a struggle not to. Luckily, Glenn’s a good enough manager that he knows when to leave me be.
I give up and take off my sleep mask. Finish the water, make the bed (hotel-style), and wander over to the Nespresso setup near my desk and set about my morning.
A latte alongside a bowl of granola with yogurt and fresh fruit, enjoyed over twenty minutes of timed social media.
Any more and I’m an addict, any less and I’m a cavewoman.
I brush my teeth and get dressed in my usual oversized button-down and tiny little skirt. I’m a creature of habit, but I’m also a creature whose doorbell wouldn’t stop ringing once during a customer call I took while not wearing pants. Never again.
I open up my laptop and take a look at my Friday.
With Monday’s planned release postponed, my calendar should be eerily empty.
But I see a meeting request from Dave for feature feedback, a request he sent me at four thirty-five in the morning.
I open our tracking system and see that the user story I created yesterday, which was estimated at three days plus testing—and not even emergency-scheduled into the current sprint—has been marked code complete and assigned to me for user acceptance testing.
There’s a link and everything. Clicking through, I see that Dave and Ingrid pulled an all-nighter to get it done.
Upsell button and everything, it’s all on the development server, ready for sign-off.
I love my team, so I let them know, even though they won’t see my message for hours.
Software engineers cannot, in my experience, log in before ten in the morning.
It’s easier to forgive that when they’ve been up all night like magical coding elves.
Dave, Ingrid, and the rest of the team truly are the reason I’m at Lettercat, I remind myself.
Working with them is so rewarding and fun that I can’t imagine leaving, no matter how annoying the leadership can be.
I run through all the flows and see no problems, then send their work along to Glenn so he can see it for himself. I debate adding Jude to the message but decide not to. I’ll use Glenn as a buffer for as long as I can.
Then I pop through my inbox to see if there’s anything of note.
A bunch of questionable feature requests, too many automated notifications that I need to set up inbox rules to clean up, a forwarded message Kate sent from the partner she mentioned last night, about having lunch next week.
A news alert I set up to track our competitors.
I click the link and go to a LinkedIn post called Huge News Coming from Tooity.
It’s a video of the cofounders of our biggest rival, the ones we’re basically in an arms race with for the same customers.
The difference, in my biased opinion, is that Lettercat cares more about the users and Tooity cares more about marketing.
For evidence, I’ll submit the front-facing video they posted just this morning, that opens with their two co-founders, their faces filtered into oblivion, mugging dramatically.
They take turns putting a hushing finger over their lips and saying “Shhhhh!” “Shhhhh!” as they record themselves walking into the lobby of an office building.
They stop walking and look fake-stunned.
Then the camera pans over to an enormous corporate logo displayed on the wall.
Corday Ford. And the video ends.
Yes, that Corday Ford. The tech behemoth in New York that’s spent the last decade operating like a snowball heading downhill, picking up all the blogs, magazines, trade publications, and online news sites.
Anything with an audience gets snapped up and the creators get paid out, then shown the door.
All the character and voice of what they made—everything quirky, unique, or special—is replaced with the bland and the corporate. And ads. Lots of ads.
Corday Ford is big, they’re growing, and they might be evil. And they’re absolutely, one hundred percent the top target for Trevor’s new product line.
And now they’ve partnered up with our main competitor.