Activity

1:20 p.m.: From the shuttle, I see a man on Jackson Street grab his crotch at a passing woman and wonder for the hundredth time how it is that not one of the crying merchandisers has ever talked to me about sexual harassment. Surely it’s happening somewhere in a company this size, right? Journalist…

People leave, of course, though we don’t say “leave”; we say they “promoted themselves to customer.” Lashanna leaves to have children. Jacie comes back after her first kid but leaves before her second. Matt leaves to become an Anglican minister. Todd leaves to breed irises. Liza leaves to sail arou…

It would be cruel for me to tell my mother how strangled I feel when she talks like this, how much I don’t want the immediate pressure to dazzle Jeff Bezos. Can’t it be enough for now that I didn’t accidentally spill something on him or freeze up? I know she’s trying to be supportive, but in the mo…

“Does Jeff Bezos want you to write a blog?” my mother calls from the living room.

“I deeply doubt it, Mom,” I call back.

“Well, he’ll be begging when he finds out what a beautiful writer you are.”

“Would you do me a huge favor?” I whisper to John. “Would you murder me?” I pour two mugs of …

“Sure,” I say. “But what’s a Lifeboat Exercise?”

It is as grotesque as it sounds: a meeting where management ranks all the employees in order of whom we’d keep on the aforementioned lifeboat in a dire, business-threatening situation and whom we’d throw overboard first.3 When the day comes, the t…