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.

This is a personal essay/story from my “book” on Substack, Will There Be Free Food? You don’t need to read the other stories to understand it, but I do recommend checking them out at the link below, which will include all of those stories, plus other personal essays and true stories from other eras of my life.

Photo by Rami Al-zayat on Unsplash

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. 

I had no idea what an account manager did, outside of some scenes of Pete Campbell in Mad Men. As it turned out, I would basically be assisting Carol with various clients with whom she closed deals, by making sure their ad campaigns got set up on the GameRich platform. All of these clients were supposed to be mobile game developers, but a great deal of them were actually agencies advertising for mobile game developers. GameRich wasn’t actually an agency. We were a platform, or in George’s words, “An app that promotes other apps.” The whole point of the GameRich system was that someone could browse our mobile app, read promotional articles and watch commercials that promoted other mobile games, and get paid out per video view or article read, via Paypal. The key point in our sales pitch was that our advertisers only paid when a user installed their app, so if someone were to watch a bunch of stuff just to get paid, it wouldn’t affect the advertisers negatively. It also meant that since users were only paid to watch content, and not paid to install games, the idea was that we delivered high quality installs as opposed to “incentivized” installs.

Within a few weeks, I felt like I was actually decent at my job. I’ve always been good at writing emails, and that was a lot of my day to day work--following up with Carol’s clients to make sure they signed their contracts or asking them for details about their ad campaigns. I also had a lot of downtime, but George didn’t seem to care.

I would sometimes accompany Carol on her sales calls, usually just cab rides away from the office. At one point, our Uber driver got wildly lost, eventually driving up and down the extremely steep streets of Pacific Heights trying to find a building that was probably miles away. Carol let out a loud laugh from the backseat and said “Well, I’ll have to tell the client we took the scenic route, huh? Sir! Sir? Can you please let us know where we’re going because we were supposed to be there twenty minutes ago.” The Uber driver didn’t really speak English, and thus, didn’t respond with much of an answer. Carol laughed unnervingly and said “Well, they’re going to be very disappointed! That’s a shame! Hahahaha!”

I forget how that meeting actually went, but I do know that later I was in charge of getting the client to sign their contract. They hadn’t signed after a few days, and I was supposed to follow up with them, but I forgot. At one point, Carol asked me about the contract and I felt a deep, hot wave of dread rising up my neck, that “I’m definitely going to be fired for this” feeling. George was within earshot. I was terrified.

“I’m sorry…they didn’t sign it and I forgot to follow up. I could follow up now if you like. It’ll never happen again.”

Carol smiled as if a dentist pried her mouth open. “That’s okay. We’ve probably just lost the business, but that’s okay.”

“Just because I forgot to follow up? I could just email them ag--.”

“It’s fine. It’s not even your fault. It’s not! It’s my fault. It’s my fault for trusting you to do this. I now know never to give you that kind of responsibility again.”

At a certain point, Carol stopped showing up to work reliably. She still showed up occasionally, but frequently left early to pick her kids up from school. It got to the point where she wasn’t in the office more often than she was (this was 2012, before working from home was commonplace). I didn’t really mind--although she wasn’t my boss, she gave me a lot more crap than George ever did, so a day without her in the office was generally a good day. Just as an example of the type of thing I didn’t have to deal with when Carol wasn’t around: I routinely bought cheap clubbing clothes on ASOS and had them delivered to the office because they always got stolen when they were delivered to our apartment. Then I would try them on right after work or during lunch, and return whatever didn’t fit me to the USPS on my way home after work. Not the most professional thing to do, but given that our CEO was frequently cursing out a rubber torso while drenched in sweat and Gatorade, it didn’t seem that inappropriate. At one point, when a package came for me, Carol pointed to it with her pen and said “You should be saving up for a house.”

“Oh, I didn’t buy it with my own money. It’s a gift from my mom.” This wasn’t true, of course, but I felt the need to defend myself against the heinous crime of ordering a $30 dress in three sizes.

Meanwhile, Vince would frequently stop by our desks, shake his head, and ask where Carol was. Not ever having any clue myself, I’d say “probably picking up her kid.” Vince responded, “Sure. Of course she is.”

One day, Carol pulled me into a conference room and told me that she was going to quit at the end of the week. I couldn’t believe it--I mean, I could believe that she was quitting since she obviously hated it there, but I was surprised she thought I needed to know in advance. 

“I know you think this place is great,” she said. “I know you’re happy here and you think this is the best it gets. But you’re young. Trust me when I say that one day you will get a job at a real company and you will realize that Vince and Robert and all these people are a fucking joke. This entire company is a joke.”

Yeah right, Carol. Stop being such a hater. GameRich is disrupting the entire mobile-app-app industry.

Carol went back to her desk, I went back to mine, and I pretended she had never said anything. Secretly, I was thrilled she would be gone but I wanted to stay on decent terms with her in case I ever needed a reference.

A mere hour later, Vince called Carol into the same conference room where we had just been. Okay, this was it. Carol was quitting. I felt like I was in an episode of The Office, trying to read lips through the glass wall of the room. The meeting went on for maybe ten minutes. Then Carol once again asked me to meet her privately.

“Well,” she said with a sigh, closing the door behind her. “Don’t tell anyone about how I was going to quit just now, because Vince just fired me.”

“Oh my God!” I didn’t care that Carol got fired, but I very much cared about how this pertained to me and my personal chances of getting fired. “Why?”

“It obviously isn’t a good fit, and he’s right about that, but also, he’s a complete jerk. Just remember that. If I were you, I’d look for another job now. But my point is, you can’t tell anyone that I was thinking of quitting. I’m over forty, which means I’m part of a protected class.”

I was about to say “No way, I thought you were thirty!” just to make her feel better but decided not to.

Carol continued. “This means they gave me decent severance--well, not that great, but better than I expected. And I can’t have anyone knowing that I was going to quit anyway if I decide to litigate to get more. So don’t tell anyone.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “I’m so sorry about this.”

“It’s for the best,” she said. “But seriously. Look for another job. When you’re older, looking back at this job, you will be saying, I can’t believe I ever worked there. Nothing here is normal.”

I had no desire to look for another job, but I knew this meant Vince had no trouble firing people and George didn’t have a whole lot of sway, because as far as I knew, George liked Carol. I figured my best course of action was to avoid annoying Vince, which wouldn’t be hard because I didn’t interact with him a whole lot. Vince’s motto was “I’m too high level for that.” Therefore, it was unlikely the work I did would ever really reach his desk. If it involved anything other than a six-figure contract, Vince wasn’t involved.

After Carol left, we hired someone else in her place, but not in the same role--I’m guessing this new hire was paid a lot less, because she was a woman just a few years older than me. Her name was Anastasia, and she was Russian and about eighty pounds. She wore her dark hair in a high, tight updo and dressed as if she were working at a law firm in Manhattan, which I kind of liked because it inspired me to build a better work wardrobe (from ASOS, of course.) Technically, Anastasia was also an account manager like me, but with Carol gone, we were both taking up the responsibility of all the inside and outside sales. 

On Anastasia’s first day, George asked her to shadow me, which meant she would have to be up in my face looking at everything I did. For most of the day, I didn’t have a lot of work so I would just read articles on XOJane titled: “It Happened To Me: I was Body Shamed By My Dog.” I realized I couldn’t do this with Anastasia lurking behind me, so I had to make up a bunch of fake things to do when I truly had very little work. She had a lot of questions about setting up her computer, which was totally expected, but it irritated me because she started every question with “Can I ask you a question?” After she did this about fifty million times in one day, I finally said “Just so you know, asking me if you can ask a question is already a question. You can ask me whatever you want.” As if that wasn’t tiring enough, Anastasia refused to leave at six o’ clock, when the workday officially ended. Luckily at this point she was at her own desk, so I was free to read clickbait articles about teenagers who discovered they were pregnant by spontaneously going into labor at Carl’s Jr. But I wanted to get home to Nick. I didn’t want to be stuck in this horrible office after dark staring at Anastasia who was also, very obviously, pretending to work.

“It’s your first day,” I said. “You don’t need to work late.”

“I know I don’t need to,” she said. “But I have so much work to do!”

She literally had no work to do. She had no clients! George even said she wasn’t allowed to start prospecting until after her first week’s trainings were done. I wanted to rip my hair out. I found myself having such a hard time containing my contempt that I almost started crying. But I couldn’t let the new girl work later than me when I knew damn right she had nothing to do. So it was a stalemate. I continued to scroll Facebook memes about finding your “secret porn star name” and searching for “Aztec print crop tops” on Forever21 until finally Anastasia walked her bony ass out of the office and I could do the same. 

With Carol gone, Anastasia and I both started to do the vast majority of the sales work that was previously on Carol’s plate. So it was kind of like a promotion, but also I wasn’t paid more and my title didn’t change. And I had to deal with Anastasia humblebragging about how busy she was every minute of the day when she was still trying to get her MS Office account set up. At one point, George decided that to prevent Anastasia and me from poaching each other’s prospects, I would handle everyone in San Francisco and Anastasia would handle everyone outside of San Francisco. This sounded wildly uneven, but because so many game developers were headquartered in San Francisco, it was actually somewhat reasonable. 

George went on a business trip one week, leaving Anastasia and me both under Vince’s management. Daddy was away and he left us with Hard Knocks Grandpa. Terrified that Vince was comparing us, I began emailing a bunch of prospects deep into the night after I got home, even going so far as to bring my laptop into the bathroom with me while I was on the toilet. I knew, on some level, that there was no way I could outperform Anastasia on this, not because she was smarter or even more hardworking but because she genuinely wanted to be in sales and I just stumbled into it because I didn’t want to be unemployed. I still believed I was going to be an award-winning novelist and this was just a brief pit stop, so it was difficult to muster any enthusiasm that wasn’t sparked by fear.

Luckily, fear went a long way with me, so from Vince’s perspective, I probably looked like I was very dedicated to my job. But he knew that sales wasn’t what I truly wanted. In passing, I had mentioned my novel to him--which at that point was a seven hundred page (so far) fantasy novel that was very obviously a replica of Game of Thrones, a fact that I didn’t want to admit even to myself. This was when Vince told me more about his metal band in the ‘80s. He understood my passion, he explained, because he was also a creative person deep down, and he wasn’t like all these “schoolboys” out there who went to college. 

“Yeah,” I said, hoping this was a good chance to bond with him and secure my position. “I wasn’t really into college either. I barely studied.” Hey, if my low GPA was ever going to help me with anyone, it was Vince.

“Wait,” Vince said. “You...you went to college?”

“I mean, it was on the job listing, wasn’t it?”

Vince shrugged. “I wouldn’t have cared if you didn’t. What a pointless thing to do. You can’t teach the kind of intelligence that I have. Emotional intelligence. That’s the only thing that really matters, not all this booksmart shit. The worst sales people I knew were college educated.”

At this point I wanted to mention that Anastasia almost certainly went to college and probably got better grades than I did. The fucking square! But that would be too obviously backstabbing. I figured Anastasia would out herself as an egghead at some point anyway. This, if anything, was a huge relief. If Vince thought people who studied were losers, perhaps he might really like me. 

When George returned from his business trip, I found out that he, like Carol, had been fired. This meant that Anastasia and I would both report directly to Vince. It also felt (perhaps rationally) like we were in a startup version of Squid Game and it was only a matter of time before I was forced to fight Anastasia to the death while Vince looked on in a glittery mask. 

Although Vince previously had no interaction with our work, that changed. A lot. Suddenly he was standing over our shoulders looking at our emails on a regular basis. One time, he happened upon me browsing bras on clearance, and he snuck up behind me only to shout “hey-o, nice!” Because of behavior like this, it sometimes seemed like he didn’t care what we did during the workday as long as we got results--and since we had no official revenue goal numbers it was hard to argue I wasn’t getting results. But then other times, Vince would solemnly lurk behind me, cough a couple times and say, “What work are you doing right now?” indicating that the fun and games were over.

The truth was, I did about as much work as I could, but there just wasn’t a lot to do. The mobile game developer world was pretty small. Vince scrapped the San Francisco vs. Rest of World parameter and opened Anastasia and me both to the entire world, pitting us against each other to poach each other’s clients, but even with this wider scope we found ourselves running across the same companies--and the same mobile games--over and over again. For example, there was a series of gambling slot and bingo games all owned by the same company, repeatedly advertised by sketchy agencies from around the world, typically out of Israel. Every single time Anastasia or I thought we had a hot lead with a six figure budget, the budget would turn out to be exclusively for a game called Bingo Pizazz and we’d sigh and say “Oh, Bingo Pizazz again” and erase the lead from our pipeline. Occasionally the game would be “different” but really just a re-skin of Bingo Pizazz and it would be called something like “Bingo Jubilee.” 

Now, you might be wondering--why did any of this matter? Why not just take these huge budgets? Well, the problem was the GameRich platform. Advertisers only paid if someone installed the game. That meant that if nobody installed the game, they didn’t actually pay us any of their gigantic budget. And nobody installed Bingo Pizazz because we had already advertised it a million times. Inevitably, this would result in some Israeli guy named Ari screaming at us and calling us idiots, repeatedly demanding that we “push it harder” like we were in a Salt N’ Pepa music video. 

Vince wasn’t taking this lying down. “Bingo Pizazz is banned,” he said one day. “In fact, Israel is banned.”

“You’re going to ban the entire country of Israel?” Anastasia asked.

“Sure. What have they advertised with us that actually got installs? It’s all that Bingo Pizazz shit just over and over again! Have we ever actually gotten a game developer from Israel or is it all these stupid affiliate agencies?”

Anastasia and I both looked at each other. He was only wrong about one thing here: we got more than just Bingo Pizazz from Israel. We also repeatedly got ad campaigns for a mail order bride scam app called Tatiana Love.

“I’m too high level for this,” Vince said. “If someone is wasting our time, I blacklist them.” Unfortunately, these pointless wastes of time took up a good amount of workday for me--which was good, because I could claim I was actually working. Without Bingo Pizazz and Tatiana Love, I really had very little work to do. Anastasia and I were circling the drain of the same tired apps that nobody wanted. It felt like being in a pyramid scheme, but without even the benefit of being able to leech off of your recruits. 

Vince began banning other companies, not even because he didn’t think they would be able to spend their budget but just because they annoyed him. If he asked me for updates on a particular lead and I said several times that they still hadn’t signed the contract because they had questions, or they were holding off until next quarter, Vince would say, “Add ‘em to the blacklist!” 

At one point, Vince determined that our biggest sales issue was that too many mobile developers thought we were just another agency, when in fact we were a platform--surely if we pointed this out, we could set ourselves apart from the competitors. We had our own app, we weren’t just creating media mixes of other platforms. He was right that this made us somewhat unique. So he demanded that I begin every sales email with (written exactly like this): WE ARE A PLATFORM, NOT AN AGENCY. He also wanted me to open real-life sales pitches this way, which resulted in me meeting a potential lead for coffee on Mission street and immediately announcing, “First of all, we are a platform. NOT an agency.”

When that failed to entice anyone, he suggested I stop using punctuation at the ends of paragraphs in cold emails. I told him that it wasn’t correct grammar to do this, which I should have known would turn him off. “That’s schoolboy crap,” he said. “I don’t play by the rules. Personally, when I see a period, I think–okay, that sentence is over.”

“Well, that’s true,” I said. “But if there’s a sentence right after it, obviously--.”

“No, not obviously. If the next sentence is in a new paragraph, I will have already exited the email. I see a period and I’m done.”

I knew this was stupid, but didn’t want to have an argument. I shrugged. “Fair enough.”

Vince had already started walking back toward his desk, but he swiveled back around. “Don’t tell me fair enough,” he said. “I tell you fair enough. Fair enough is what you say when it’s ultimately your decision. You aren’t making the decision here. I am. I never want to hear you say fair enough again.”

Around this time, Anastasia quit. She found a sales role at Google, and literally danced when she announced her departure. I had never seen her so cheery about anything. I had to try very hard to contain myself, because without Anastasia in the way, I owned...all of sales. I was effectively the VP of Sales at GameRich! Fuck yeah! Of course, nobody would pay me accordingly or even change my title to “Senior Account Manager” as I had repeatedly asked, and I wasn’t allowed to use periods, but hey, maybe one day!

With Anastasia gone, Vince and I started working even more closely. I would accompany him on the big sales calls he’d make in Palo Alto. We found ourselves on little road trips, forced to talk to each other for a two hour round trip. We talked about my book, his rock band, his girlfriend (apparently she was Thai and “they really know how to cook while the men smoke cigars”) my boyfriend, and Vince’s patent-pending diet plan that he thought would revolutionize the diet industry: a plate shaped like Pac Man that would only accommodate two thirds of a portion. I asked him if this was just a portion control strategy and he said, “No. It’s the plate. You need the plate to be able to do it.”

Vince didn’t have kids, or even an ex-wife. I often wondered what led someone to be fifty-five (I eventually found out this was his exact age) without much of a family backstory. Although he never said it directly, I got the sense that his lack of a wife and child wasn’t voluntary. I wasn’t sure what the deal was with his girlfriend. I met her at a very empty GameRich holiday party once. She didn’t speak much English, Vince spoke no Thai, but she was also close in age to Vince, so it wasn’t really a trophy wife situation. Either way, there was something about Vince that at times made me deeply sad.

When I told my friends and family about Vince they told me to “document everything.” And there was a lot to document. One time, he asked me to use his phone to test our web app, and when I entered his home screen I discovered it was covered in various porn apps, some of which were dedicated specifically to butts (the most memorable one was called Bouncing Ass.) He would flirt with me, but in a harmless way usually preceded by “Don’t sue me!” When Nick proposed to me on a day trip to Sonoma, I told Vince I got engaged, and he responded quizzically with simply: “Why?” followed up with, “Well, this is the thinnest you’re ever going to get, I guess.” There was something sweet about him from time to time, and other times I truly hated him, like when he would stand behind my desk for a full thirty minutes asking me why I wasn’t emailing anyone (the answer: he had blacklisted all my leads). 

I knew he made statements that were supposed to offend me, and most of the time they didn’t--it felt like talking to a funny but outdated uncle at Thanksgiving. But sometimes his comments actually were offensive, like when he said Jews must have been “God’s little troublemakers” because they got kicked out of every country they inhabited, followed up by the comment, “But seriously, I love the Jewish people. There is no culture I love more than Jewish culture.” 

One time, Vince and I went on a sales call with one of our engineers, Jose. We all sat in the backseat of a cab, with Vince and me at the window seats and Jose in the middle seat between us. We stopped at a traffic light and Vince began laughing out of nowhere, telling me “You need to bend over right now.” 

“No,” I said. “I’m not doing that.”

“No, please, just bend over for a second, you’ll see, it’s a joke.”

“Uh...no? I think I know what the joke is.”

“Just bend over so nobody in other cars can see you. It’s an inappropriate joke that you wouldn’t get, I’ll explain it to you later.”

I didn’t want to argue so I reluctantly lowered my head between my legs while Vince cackled. 

“Can I get back up now?” I asked.

“Sure,” said Vince.

“Can you explain the joke now?” I knew what the joke was, of course, but I figured the very least I could do was humiliate Vince back by forcing him to say “I wanted to make it look like you were giving Jose a blowjob.”

Vince tried, in vain, to collect himself. It took a while. When he finally stopped laughing, he said, “With you down there and not visible, people in other cars would think Jose and I were a couple! Like a gay couple!”

Vince also mentored me 1:1 in little sales training sessions that he definitely didn’t prepare ahead of time. In one training session, he asked me to sell him a coffee cup using only raw emotional intelligence. Of course, I immediately started detailing all the great features of the coffee cup. He stopped me.

“When you’re trying to make a sale, you want to ask questions. The best salespeople know how to shut up and listen. You should always start by asking the person what they’re currently using instead of your product. Then you can explain why your product is better.”

“What if our product isn’t better?”

“Just ask me what I’m currently using for coffee.”

“Okay,” I said. I cleared my throat. “Sir, what are you currently using to drink coffee?”

“Well,” Vince said, with an entirely straight face. “I usually just stick my open mouth under the coffee machine.”

“Oh, well, um...have you tried a coffee cup?”

“No. Tell me more.”

“It’s great because you don’t have to get your face all wet from the coffee machine, and you can hold it by the handle so your hand doesn’t get hot.”

“Well, shucks, that sounds amazing. I’ll buy fifty.” He paused. “And, scene. See? Just ask questions.”

I want to say that this training was completely ridiculous, but it actually wasn’t. A year and a half into my role, I was having no trouble closing $50K contracts with just one phone call. Only one problem: none of these people would be able to spend their budget on our platform. Apple had, several times, removed the GameRich app from its store because it was cracking down on apps that served no purpose other than advertising. To be fair to Robert and Vince, this was not originally in Apple’s original Terms of Service. Let’s just say the disembodied boxing torso earned the “Apple” logo very quickly. Every time Apple took GameRich off the platform, GameRich was limited to web app and Android, our installs plummeted and we lost clients who were unable to spend their budget. Over time, no client would be able to spend their budget. 

But that didn’t stop Vince from feeling optimistic about our capabilities as an Android app and mobile web app. I saw him get frustrated--usually with inane micro-issues in the office, like whether or not we worked during lunch, as opposed to the larger issue that the company was failing--but I never saw him lose hope.

While Vince might not have changed, my perception of him had. I had seen way too much of him to be scared of him or his judgment. I knew, for example, that he had no idea how to use Powerpoint. He didn’t even know how to use Gmail, or any of our company’s portals. Every time he had to, he would ask me to show him how to do it “just so I can make sure you know how to do it.”

Although it seemed totally taboo, I met up with George for lunch one day to discuss potentially leaving GameRich. George had since secured a senior management role at Salesforce. I told him how much I loved working with him and how much I needed his advice. George’s advice sounded a lot like the advice I got from Carol, albeit worded differently: “Vince is a problem. GameRich isn’t going anywhere. You will eventually, at some point, realize you need to leave and find something better for your career.”

As soon as I got back to the office, I drafted up a thank you email for George, especially since he paid for our lunch and took time out of his busy day to give me this advice. I wrote him a heartfelt note telling him that I couldn’t bring myself to quit just yet--that I had hoped that somehow Vince would turn GameRich around. I knew it wasn’t going well, I admitted, but I just wasn’t ready to give up.

Email sent. That was when I heard the guy behind me, one of our engineers, say, “Uh...did you just send an email to George?”

“Oh my God, did you backtrace it through the code?”

“No. You sent it to his old work email address from when he worked here. It bounced. It was automatically forwarded to everyone in the company.”

In that moment, if someone had given me the option to instantly and painlessly die, I would have taken it in a second. Robert and Vince were in the middle of an executive meeting with the VP of engineering and other senior leaders. Through the glass, I saw Robert pull up my email to George on the projector. This couldn’t possibly be happening. This was something I would dream about--although in that dream, Rosie O’ Donnell and my high school art teacher or someone else might be there--but there was no way this was real life.

Vince emerged from the meeting and made a beeline to my desk. Obviously, I was getting fired. I just hoped it wouldn’t be too humiliating.
“Sooo…” he said coyly. “I saw your email.”

“I know. I’m so sorry. We just got lunch for mentorship and--.”

“I didn’t realize you had such hope in GameRich.”

“I, uh--.”

“It’s nice to see that. You said you were going to stay. Embarrassing for you that everyone saw it, though. Glad to have you here.” 

Despite the fact that I saw the writing on the wall--that GameRich almost certainly wouldn’t exist a year from then--I was determined to stay. I felt, weirdly, indebted to Vince, as if we were close friends and not boss and employee. And I didn’t even like him. I even yelled at him one time when he announced “Nobody is allowed to send emails today,” because I sent one email he didn’t understand.

Vince even started to seem a bit tired. Our app traffic had gone down to pretty much nothing. He still insisted I send prospecting emails to the few app developers who weren’t on his blacklist, but he knew on some level they would never respond. Once, when I was feeling especially demoralized, he sat on the edge of my desk and said, “You know how you have this novel you’re writing, and you want to be a novelist one day? I was like you at one point. I thought I was going to be a rock star. And well? I’m not. Look around. This is it. This is the best it gets.”

One day when I was working late (well, not really working–we no longer had any clients–I was browsing steel-boned corsets online) our financial controller, Mark, pulled me into a conference room. He seemed incredibly upset. We didn’t know each other that well, but we had a pleasant coworker relationship, so seeing him like this was fairly disturbing. Being a twenty-three-year-old woman, I didn’t often see men in their forties with looks of abject terror and sadness on their faces.

“I’m only telling you this,” he said, opening his laptop. “You can’t tell anyone I told you. But Vince and Robert are trying to secure a loan right now. If we don’t get this loan, we’re over.”

“Like out of business?”

“Yes. And even if we do get a loan, it won’t last for long. They’re going to start getting rid of people.”

“Do you think I’d be one of those people?”

“You’d likely be the first of those people. Nobody told me that, but from previous experiences I’ve noticed they tend to get rid of junior sales first. And they don’t have the money to pay severance.”

Excuse you, I’m the VP of sales!

“Thanks for letting me know. Out of curiosity, why are you only telling me?”

“You seem like a nice person,” he said. “And I feel like you didn’t realize what you were getting into when you started working here.”

This shouldn’t have been a surprise. People had been quitting left and right. I didn’t want to quit--the thought of even having that conversation with Vince made me extremely uncomfortable. But getting laid off without severance? Oh, that would be worse.

The next week, I asked Vince to meet me in one of the conference rooms. I tried to keep it as short as I could, telling him I appreciated all that he had done and all that he had taught me, but I would be leaving due to another opportunity. My heart was racing. I couldn’t believe people actually quit their jobs for reasons like “wanting more career growth.” This was horrible and I hated it and I never wanted to quit anything again. I actually wasn’t lying about the new opportunity--I had been able to quickly find a role at an ad agency where another former GameRich employee had gone--but I gladly would have stayed at GameRich if I didn’t think I was about to be laid off. This other job wasn’t even a pay increase–they had actually offered me less, but I negotiated it “up” to the same salary I had at GameRich. 

I expected Vince to either crack an extremely weird joke, or start yelling at me. But on some level I wondered if he was happy to hear this--happy that he wouldn’t have to fire me himself. Although he had been so excited to fire George and Carol, I realized after seeing the financials (which indicated I should have been let go a while ago, especially given that Vince could pick up what little sales work there was to do) that he likely wanted to avoid firing me as long as he possibly could. For some reason, he wanted me around in an office that was increasingly empty.  I saw something in his face that I saw sporadically at other times too: sadness.

He gave me a little smile. “Well, I’m happy for you,” he said. “I’m sorry to see you go. We’ll miss you.”

At the time, I responded with “Thank you, I’ll miss you too.” But what he didn’t know was that it wasn’t really goodbye–there was no period at the end of the sentence