Chapter 7: The Best it Gets
I was 22 and wanted to get ahead in my tech role. Enter my new mentor: Vince, a 55-year-old man who couldn't use Powerpoint.
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George, the man interviewing me for my account manager role at GameRich was a tall, bald, middle-aged dude in a suit. He was their VP of Sales. You might think that as a twenty-two-year-old woman in the San Francisco tech scene, I might be put off by such a conventional-looking person, but after my unsuccessful run at Articley (as seen in Chapter 2), where everyone talked in goofy falsetto voices to announce quarterly earnings and dressed up as Star Wars characters while saying things like “roflcopter”, I kind of just wanted something boring. It felt like I had just elected Tinky Winky as President, and after Tinky Winky stoked a violent race war, I desperately cast my next ballot for Mitt Romney just to return to some semblance of normality.
One thing about this interview that might have been a red flag for others but wasn’t for me: it took place in a coffee shop and immediately led to a job offer. I never got to see the office or meet anyone other than George. But I took the offer instantly, and didn’t even negotiate–especially because the offer was for more than I had asked. Although the salary was barely enough to survive long-term in San Francisco, I had previously been making $15/hour to paraphrase terrible pop culture articles, so as soon as I got my job offer, I burst into happy tears and exclaimed, “I can be the person who buys things at Whole Foods!” (Note: I did not become that person, I still made nowhere near enough money for that.) Nick, at that point my live-in boyfriend, was also working, but given that he was at an early-stage startup and he wasn’t getting paid a salary at all, a real annual salary and my first true full-time role felt like discovering a hidden grail of treasure under our floorboards. Although it didn’t propel me into the Whole Foods class, it did mean that I could stop buying discarded fish gills from the Chinatown markets for our seafood dishes.
When I showed up to my first day at work, I realized that the GameRich office was a large warehouse-style building located at possibly the most poop-ridden intersection of the city. That was to be expected, but something else about the office surprised me. For some reason I pictured myself being part of a team of peers. Instead, the GameRich office looked like a bunch of plane crash survivors stuck together by chance. No common theme, no “culture,” not even a single decoration in the office. I didn’t see this as a positive, but perhaps it wasn’t a negative. Maybe it was like when your science teacher doesn’t let anyone pick partners for lab--disappointing because it might have been fun to work with a friend, but for people like me ultimately a good thing because there’s no risk of being excluded.
There was only one other person who reported to George, the VP of sales--a woman in her mid-forties named Carol. Carol was pretty much the last person I would expect to see at a scrappy startup located in the commercial real estate equivalent of a Red Hot Chili Peppers song. She wore fuschia Ann Taylor blazers and lipstick, emanating big Lean In energy with every click-clack of her Banana Republic heels. She had two children, including a girl who she made a point to announce didn’t play with dolls. She implied that she used to have some kind of high-powered role elsewhere, but was now an account executive at GameRich. I thought this must have been a senior role, because if it wasn’t, Carol wouldn’t be taking it and it wouldn’t include the word “executive” but I later realized this role is generally considered entry-level or associate.
While Carol and I reported to George, George reported to Vince, the Chief Revenue Officer of GameRich. Vince was a hair-gelled, bowling-shirt-wearing, fifty-something who told us he didn’t go to college (he went to the school of Hard Knocks–and yes, this is actually something he said.) Vince got his start in tech sales by selling floppy disks out of his truck in the ‘90s for 100% commission (“Fear is the greatest motivator,” he said. “And I was literally scared and hungry.”) He prided himself on “telling the truth well” but never lying. Vince worked alongside the CEO, Robert, who spent most of his day sweating puddles on a treadmill, and occasionally punching the shit out of a boxing dummy with a bunch of competitor companies’ names taped to it. Robert screamed a lot. We didn’t interact with him very much.
On my first day, I wore a fitted black pencil dress with a pink cashmere cardigan and low-heel shoes from Aerosoles that were probably meant for a seventy-year-old woman with arthritis, but I wore them because I walked multiple miles to work. I dressed like this mostly because my attire was split into lounge/gym clothes and going-out attire that had me confused with a sex worker on several occasions, one of which involving the police in Central Park (they quizzed Nick to see if he knew my birthday.) My work wardrobe, as a result, was limited to Christmas gifts from my mom. I wasn’t sure exactly how to dress at GameRich--Carol dressed like Angelica’s mom from Rugrats, George dressed like a normal business guy, Vince dressed like Tony Soprano’s non-mobster cousin who just worked at a dealership, and the perpetually sweaty Robert dressed like a guy who had been drenched in a tub of water for some kind of charity event. I split the difference by--and I’m not sure why I thought this was a good idea--keeping my dress and cardigan but ditching the shoes and just walking around barefoot. At some point, George kindly let me know that I should keep shoes on if I was going to be in the office.
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