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“I am,” he said. “You’re saying how quickly the winds can change. I’d better watch my step.”
“No,” she said. “I’m saying, I’d like to love you.”
“But?” he said.
“But you’re making it hard,” she said.
Miles felt his skin sloughing off. His bones had quit too. He’d be nothing but a mess of hair and organs and blood after this, and she would like to love him.
“I think it’s fair,” he said, “to want to be able to live my life without feeling that I’m about to lose you to a grocery trip.”
“A hike,” she said.
“And you wanted me to know all this for what?” he said. “You wanted to leave, and now you’re not, and you’d like to love me, and you wanted me to carry all this around with me for the rest of my life, for what?”
“This is what you asked for,” she said.
“This is not what I asked for,” he said.
“It’s what you ask for all the time,” she said.
“What do I ask for?” he said.
“How I feel,” she said. “You ask me to tell you. So, this is how I felt.”
“Well, shit,” he said. “It’s a little late.”
ouch
“You think a death threat’s irrelevant?”
“I was talking about your trash-can bullshit,” she said. “You think you’re the only one getting death threats?” She stopped spinning and stared at the screen for a second before typing something in, then spinning again.
Miles stewed. He hadn’t meant to make this about the threats, but all he could think now was that Lily had no idea what she was talking about. No idea what he’d been going through, or how hard he’d worked to avoid making it her problem. Maybe she’d read some comments online, received a few emails, but he had a drawerful in his kitchen! He won.
brutal
“I understand,” he said, “that someone of your talent and intelligence would want to find a more proactive solution for our nothing problem. And what I’m saying is . . . Please help me. Help me do that. I can’t just pack up and go find something to believe in. I’m sorry, but I can’t. Maybe you can, but you don’t know what it’s like for me. You don’t have kids. I can’t just leave a job like this and start a bakery.”
“I have a son,” she said.
“I’ve done good in my life,” Miles insisted, annoyed with the way she was looking at him, like he’d let her down once again by being so typically Miles. He would have known she had a son if she had told him. Or, if she had told him and he’d forgotten, wasn’t forgetting important personal information about a coworker a human enough flaw to be forgiven this once? “I worked on a show,” he said. “People loved it. They wrote papers.”
lmao
Despite the popularity of the adage, Miles did not believe youth was wasted on the young. The pleasures of youth were the by-product of its shallowness, the ability to feel things deeply and then forget them, to hurry from one moment to the next, taking life as for granted as possible. It wasn’t a waste; it was the point.
i like this
The pleasures it provided had only served to underline Miles’s creeping suspicion that his life was becoming unmanageable. A single present sentence from his daughter had been enough to make him feel invincible. It felt suddenly so pathetic. His life felt small, and far from him, and the comforts of the machine were being converted directly into back fat.
oof
“No, Kristi, it’s not, and you are right to look surprised because it’s fucking insane that every price on this website is set manually by a buyer. So I’m hired to fix it, give buyers their time back to do something more productive. But guess what: every time I turn around I discover some new team of buyers asking, ‘Who is this guy and why the fuck is he here?’ I explain my charter and they freak because they didn’t get to have input into the requirements, because I didn’t know their team fucking existed and vice versa. So they escalate to their director, he throws a fit, and I’m back gathering requirements again while the engineers threaten to abandon the project if I keep making them wait. This is normal to some extent, Kristi. To some extent this is just what a product manager does. But it goes beyond normal at Amazon, because people are like mushrooms here.”
There are so many men here, men from Sloan and the University of Michigan and McKinsey and Deloitte. They’re transitioning to barefoot running. They bought Vibrams last month, and a sous vide machine. They like Big Hairy Audacious Goals, and in college they once saw Modest Mouse five times in a year. They have three kids and a wife with an expired law license because it just made more sense for her to be the stay-at-home parent. They work standing up. They’ve slowly come around on Belgian ales, and Tim Ferriss’s book really made them think. They wish they had more time to read. They like their steak rare and their hot sauce vicious. When they interrupt you at your desk, they’re sorry for the drive-by. When something goes wrong, they’re working on a path to green. They don’t just agree; they violently agree. They’re blocking and tackling and focused on the inputs and not getting distracted by orthogonal matters. Going paleo has been huge for them, and tequila is allowed. Can they just play devil’s advocate for a second? Can they just pressure test your idea? Can they just push back on that a little? These last three are them saying you are wrong. Sometimes they say it in an Amazon way and sometimes in a man way, though already the difference is getting pretty hard to discern.
lol
“I know,” Marnie says. “But he’s done it to everyone. Last year at CES, he took us out to Delmonico’s, and I asked the waiter for a vegetable plate because I just wasn’t in the mood for a steak. After dinner Chuck accused me of ‘sending a signal’ that he wasn’t inclusive of vegetarians. But then it was done, and he’s never mentioned it again.”
“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 twenty-odd managers in Chuck’s org gather in a conference room that reeks of onions from some pizza a previous group left behind. It’s windowless except for a panel by the door that HR has covered with blank paper. Handwritten signs reading DO NOT ENTER!!!!!! ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW IN PROGRESS are posted on both doors. By 6:00 p.m., we’re an hour over the scheduled end time and are only halfway through the alphabet. The doughnuts Chuck’s assistant brought have been sitting untouched in the middle of the table—doughnuts don’t really sync with onion fumes—but now people are starting to pick at them, sensing dinner could be a long way off. I wish someone would at least call for a ten-minute break, but it’s not going to be me. If I’ve learned anything this year, it’s that the kinds of people who openly admit to needing food or pee breaks are also the kinds of people who get hurled off lifeboats around here.
lol
“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 decaf and bring them out to my parents. “I don’t really need or want Jeff Bezos to beg me to write a blog,” I say.
“He might even be one of the smartest people in America,” says my dad.
lmao