I Threw The Worst Networking Event of All Time

I'm bad at jobs, and bad at getting people to attend my parties--what could go wrong?

If you’re opening this, there’s a decent chance you were one of the people who subscribed for my viral personal essay earlier this week, about how everyone hated me at my Big Tech work orientation. I actually publish 5x/week, and while some of these are personal essays exactly like that one, I also cover topics like sex and relationships, parenting, fashion, and even….gorillas who can’t get laid? Anyway, because you guys really seemed to enjoy the work-related personal essay, here’s another one. This one will be free, but usually they’re paid. As my existing subscribers can confirm, there’s plenty more where that came from.

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Photo by Balint Miko on Unsplash

In front of my desk at WowTag (name changed for legal reasons) was a poster that showed an adorable bunny rabbit character about to be eaten by a bear, above text reading: Innovate or Die.

“I put it there to motivate Daichi,” the thirty-year-old CEO, Dan, said bitterly. I met Daichi during my interview a few weeks earlier. I was under the impression that we would be teammates on a two-person sales team, when in reality I was being hired to replace him. As Dan walked me through the rest of the office (a WeWork space about the size of a closet) he adorned our conversation with grievances about Daichi--he came from a B2C background and sucked at B2B sales, he went on the ESPN website all the time and didn’t do his work, he bolded words in his emails and it looked tacky.

Dan wouldn’t be my direct boss--my direct boss reported to Dan, and his name was Hiroto. We all sat together at one giant desk. Everyone at WowTag was Japanese except for me, because it was an offshoot of a larger Japanese company. Dan spoke with an English accent and had an English name, because he grew up in England, but he was born in Japan like everyone else. I didn’t mind being the only non-Japanese person on the team, even if it meant there would be long meetings taking place in Japanese where I was expected to attend but couldn’t participate. What I did mind, however, was that I was fairly underpaid, making exactly what I made at my previous job if not slightly less when factoring in bonuses. The only reason I took the role at WowTag was because I believed (accurately) that my former employer (GameRich, from this essay) was going out of business. WowTag might have been just as unstable--we sold an extremely niche ad-tracking technology exclusively to US-based advertisers who wanted to market in Japan– but I wasn’t yet at the point in my career where “what the company sells” was that important.

It was a job, WeWork had free lime water, and although Dan came off as a bit of a jerk, Hiroto seemed like one of the kindest people I could ever dream to work with. Hiroto was in his forties, a veritable dinosaur in the San Francisco adtech startup world, and I liked the idea of working directly under someone with experience.

Next I met Aiko, a woman a few years older than I was. She was the office manager, but I think she was meant to represent all things vaguely administrative, from HR to recruiting to making lunch reservations. She was the only other woman in the office, which would have been more damning if the office had more people in it at all. It was pretty much just me, Dan, Hiroto, Aiko, and then Kazuki, a skinny male account manager in his thirties who didn’t speak a lot of English.

I knew I stuck out, culturally and physically, as the only non-Japanese person in the office, but Dan might have been more of a sore thumb than I was. Instead of casual hoodies and jeans like the rest of the team, he wore costumey versions of what a child might expect a young CEO to wear--fedoras, pastel polo shirts with pocket squares, shorts with plaid ribbon belts, designer loafers. He was a broad, imposing presence with a deep, booming voice. He wasn’t as polite as Hiroto, Aiko and Kazuki, who did everything with a certain level of formality and decorum, erring on the side of being ultra-respectful and polite, even when they didn’t have to. Dan behaved more like your stereotypical English lad in a Burberry tracksuit who might start a car fire after a Manchester United loss. In fact, he had two computers at his desk: one for work and one for soccer. He would routinely smash his fist down on the table and curse because of something happening on the soccer screen. On my second day of work, he invited his friends over to get drunk (Wework provided free beer) and stopped me in the hallway to tell me I had a “big ass for a white girl.” (I was horrified that he made this comment at work, but honestly a bit flattered, because I was trying to grow my glutes at the time.) Then he told me I should wear dresses more often, lamenting that he didn’t understand why so many young girls wear pants.

You’re probably wondering why I continued working another day at WowTag. I cared about security more than I cared about anything else, and given my previous experiences at equally unchained startups, I didn’t think his comment was that strange. Inappropriate, yes, but nothing that would warrant forcing myself into unemployment or sitting through some kind of sexual harassment lawsuit. Oh boo hoo, someone complimented my amazing ass.

On my third day at WowTag, I was late because I needed to fill a prescription at CVS and something happened where they magically had no record of me in the system and had to call my doctor. They told me it would only take fifteen minutes, but I worried it might be longer. To make sure nobody at work thought I had bailed in an attempt to flee from Dan, I texted Hiroto and let him know. He said he understood and to take my time.

When I got to the office, I was an hour late. Dan was furious. He was propped up against my desk with his arms crossed, as if he had posed himself there for the full hour, waiting for me to return.

“You do realize it’s your third day and you’re an hour late?”

“I know. I’m sorry, but I texted Hiroto.”

“You did,” Hiroto said thoughtfully. “But you didn’t say it would be an hour. An hour is unacceptable.”

“I’m sorry, I had to get my prescription filled. I can’t miss a day of my medication.”

“It’s okay,” Dan said. “We have a solution for things like this.” He took a hefty bottle of Jack Daniels out of his desk and placed it on the table in front of me. “If you’re late, you take a double shot.”

I was thrilled that the “solution” wasn’t firing me, but extremely nauseated at the idea of taking warm double shots of whiskey at 10 in the morning. But I did it, of course.

“There you go, all is forgiven,” Dan said, his hand on my back as I choked and the whiskey burned the back of my mouth. In that moment, I felt weirdly appreciative of Dan’s mercy. I wondered if this was what BDSM was like.

“You have to be careful, though,” Dan said. Then, as if reading my mind, he added, “This is your first offense. Next time, you get spanked.”

I looked at Aiko, as if to ask, Did I actually hear that right? But Aiko was staring at her laptop, ignoring the situation.

Dan continued. “I’m not joking either. That’s what happened to Kazuki. Isn’t that right, Kazuki?”

Kazuki smiled and nodded several times, like a dog with a long history of being whipped. To drive the point home that he absolutely wasn’t kidding, Dan pulled a fraternity-style spanking paddle from his depraved desk of goodies and raised it above Kazuki’s trembling head.

As bizarre as his behavior was, Dan had a certain charisma that made people want to stick around, even when he was spanking them. He valued community and made a rule (which nobody followed) that everyone at the company should give and receive at least one compliment a day. We did team lunches on Fridays at nearby restaurants, usually a Thai place with an endless menu that I loved (we still had to pay for our meals, of course, but it was nice to get time for lunch instead of having to eat at our desks.) Like many assholes, Dan could be funny, and when he wasn’t threatening to abuse people for being late, he was strangely easygoing (for example, allowing people extra vacation time and not telling corporate in Japan) but mostly because he was drunk. That was another thing about Dan: he was almost always a little bit drunk. He essentially microdosed alcohol for the entire workday. If you caught him at a moment when he wasn’t drunk, he wasn’t so forgiving.

WowTag had virtually no name in the advertising world, so Dan’s mission was to build up a strong reputation and customer base in San Francisco. We had a limited budget for advertising, though, and in a sea of identical adtech companies it was nearly impossible to distinguish ourselves. Mostly, Dan relied on building up our customer base by hiring people who had an existing Rolodex of contacts, like me and Hiroto. Once we ran through those contacts, and once the contacts realized our product was overpriced and extremely niche (despite selling mostly to American companies, we could only help them run ads in Japan) we were back at square one. Dan’s solution was to host a party at the WeWork space (it would be a free venue, with free beer) and invite potential clients.

I had a background in sales and content, but I had never planned a company event before. Dan asked me if I would take “full responsibility” for such a project. I couldn’t exactly say no, but I did warn him that I had no experience doing this--even my sales experience was minimal. I had a sneaking suspicion that parties were one of the various disciplines Dan thought defaulted to female employees, like how he would send Aiko and me to the mall to buy chocolates for the team every now and then, condescendingly telling us that he was empowering us to choose which chocolates we bought.

Because I had a feeling that Dan would have strong opinions on the type of party we threw, I asked him if he wanted any particular theme.

“Well, we help people advertise in Japan,” he said. “So something international.”

“Okay, how about we just do, like, a Japanese theme? That way the people who come might actually be interested in finding Japanese customers.”

“No, no,” he said, already visibly frustrated. “Then it’s too limited. Let’s just do international. Like international flags, international stuff, you know.”

I nodded, as I typed “international” into a gmail draft email. “So like, an international cocktail party?”

“No, that’s boring,” Dan said. “I want something more exciting. Something people will remember. Something like mojitos... what about an international mojito mixer?”

“I would think if it’s international maybe we could just say cocktails because mojitos are kind of specific to a few cultures and...like, I don’t know, what about other drinks?”

“We don’t have the budget to have that much variety, let’s just do mojitos.”

I wasn’t going to argue. Dan tasked me with setting up the Eventbrite invitation. I had never created an Eventbrite invitation so I wasn’t sure exactly what to say in the description field–we also hadn’t even figured out the day or the invite list yet, so I added our company logo as the header image, along with a short and sweet description that said something like, “Come to WeWork for an international mojito mixer to meet the WowTag team and learn about advertising in Japan!” I figured I might change it if more details came up, but as of that point all I knew was that we would be serving mojitos and the party would be vaguely international.

A few days later, Dan asked me where I was on the mojito mixer front. He asked if I had created the Eventbrite page yet. I confidently assured him that I had, and it was all taken care of. He asked to see it. I should not have shown it to him.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “This looks like a five minute job.”

I didn’t know what to say–it was a five minute job, and even five minutes was a generous overestimate, but I also wasn’t sure how I was supposed to spend more than five minutes describing a party that hadn’t been planned yet.

“Would you like me to add more content?” I asked. My eyes darted around the room. Aiko and Kazuki could definitely hear this but were acting like they couldn’t. Hiroto was in the corner slowly shaking his head.

“Well, yeah, I’d like you to add more content.” Dan raised his voice slightly. “When I ask you to be completely responsible for something I mean that I want you to put all your effort into it. This looks like you didn’t even care.”

I was such a terrible party planner in my personal life that it was no surprise I’d be bad at this too. I had once planned a Y2K-themed birthday party for myself and because I had a feeling guests might not understand the concept of early ‘00s fashion (considering the party was taking place in the 2010s, before anyone was reviving the early ‘00s) I included a long list of costume ideas but inadvertently sent the message that people not wearing one of those costumes would be barred from entry. All in all, five people showed up, including my husband, Nick. I was, quite possibly, the last person who should have been asked to plan a party for WowTag.

“I mean, look at this,” Dan said, motioning to his screen (not the soccer screen.) “This looks like...I mean, it’s just our fucking company logo. Nothing about it being international. This is a mojito mixer. When you think about a mojito mixer you think of green, or of...fucking mojitos! You don’t think of the WowTag logo!”

For some reason, I took this moment to quickly and quietly switch out the WowTag logo with a stock photo of mojitos, as if Dan hadn’t already seen the original header. Dan’s screen refreshed automatically.

“Did you just change the header image?” he asked, rage bubbling to the surface.

“Well you said you wanted it--.”

“DID YOU JUST TYPE WHILE I WAS TALKING TO YOU?!” His fist slammed down on the table. “When I’m fucking talking, you listen to me, you don’t do anything!”

Although I had my fair share of awkward if not mildly traumatizing work experiences elsewhere, getting screamed at certainly made the top five. When you have an argument with someone at work, it might be customary to say “and then they went crazy, screaming about…” when in reality, there was just a minor disagreement over a meeting agenda that got somewhat heated, but in this case, Dan was literally screaming at the top of his lungs.

“I’m sorry. I thought it would be best to change things as soon as possible.”

“You wait until I’m done talking to you! That’s another five minute job! Not even five minutes, you did that in like two seconds.” Was I going to be spanked?

Hiroto was staring at me. He gave me a look as if to ask if I was okay. I was on the verge of tears, but refused to cry. The entire culture of WowTag was steeped in dynamics of shame and dignity (one woman from the Tokyo office supposedly had to create a Powerpoint of all her failures and mistakes to atone to her superiors). Crying would have been especially humiliating, even if it was justified.

Once Dan was over the horror of the Eventbrite invite, he took me to a distant Party City in the suburbs to get decorations. It wasn’t totally clear what he wanted, but it was clear that he wanted me to simultaneously plan everything and still give him complete creative control. I actually didn’t mind handing control over to him–I didn’t want to plan this anyway, and I had my doubts that it would be valuable in the first place. He showed up at the register holding a surprising variety of decorations- a banner of various international flags (okay, this made sense) and a streamer of tropical plastic leaves which I assumed had something to do with the mojito theme.

On the drive back to the office, Dan started talking to me about his girlfriend. He made a point of telling me she was nineteen. For the record, any unpleasant air around our relationship had cleared by then. Dan had the ability to eviscerate someone and then unilaterally decide the awkwardness was over a few hours later.

“She’s just immature, you know? I mean, what’s your advice?”

“Oh, I don’t know. If she’s immature it’s probably because she’s nineteen. She’s probably just acting her age.”

Dan scratched his chin with the hand that wasn’t on the steering wheel. “You’re right. She is a lot younger than me. I just feel like I give in the relationship and she barely notices everything I do for her. I brought her soup when she had a cold and she didn’t even say thank you, you know? It fucking sucks. And I don’t want to be sexist or anything but I’m the man, okay, I should be the provider but that was more of a woman thing to do, the soup, and it’s not like she’d ever do that for me.”

I wasn’t going to pick a pointless argument with him about gender roles. “I cook for Nick all the time,” I said, for some absurd reason. What, did I want Dan to think I was a good wife? What the fuck was wrong with me?

“See, I know you’re married and I would never hit on you, even if I wanted to, because that’s just a line I don’t cross,” he said. “Like I might ask you to get lunch or something, but that’s a work thing, it’s not a sexual thing, not even a little, okay? But I would like to date someone like you. Not you, obviously, but someone like you. Women don’t act like women anymore. I think women should work and I think it’s great that they do, but can they do that and wear a skirt? Would that be so hard? Where do I find a woman like you?”

“You don’t want a woman like me. I actually have a lot of mental problems.”

“I don’t mean you, like I said. I’m not hitting on you. The minute I find out a woman is in a relationship, I literally cannot be turned on by her. It’s physically impossible.”

I looked ahead at the road in front of us, the green leaves from the Party City bag poking out and appearing in the rearview mirror. “I think this is gonna be a really cool party,” Dan finally said.

Amid the planning for the mojito mixer, I still had to perform my regular duties as a salesperson. Although it didn’t happen often, occasionally I would have the opportunity to meet a client in person in San Francisco. The first time this happened at WowTag, I made sure to dress a bit fancier than usual. My “usual” was still extremely formal for San Francisco. Now that I was married and in my mid-twenties, I was graduating from most (but not all) of my clubwear and opting for a classic “Mad Men inspired” look. It was hard to find pieces that were retro-inspired enough for my tastes without finding myself on an inexplicably racist-seeming rockabilly website. But I spent so much time online shopping that I had made myself a decent wardrobe of fit and flare dresses, bright bauble necklaces, mary jane style high heels, and cardigans.

My workwear (real phoot) for WowTag

I’d be lying if I said the fact that Dan regularly voiced his preference for that type of outfit didn’t influence me to play it up. Sure, it was feeding into “bad behavior,” but this wasn’t some kind of feminist viral tweet, I wasn’t going to come into the office dressed in low-rise baggy jeans stained with menstrual blood just to say “Fuck off Dan and fuck your male gaze” to a profound standing ovation. I wanted to keep my job and stay in his good graces. If you didn’t play the WowTag game in some way, I realized, you might wind up ritualistically humiliated like Kazuki.

On the day of my first client meeting (to which Dan was accompanying me) I wore a midi-length navy skirt, a pair of cream colored mary jane heels, a pearl necklace and a cardigan. Although I thought Dan would either say nothing or compliment me on being “one of the only good women left” or something weird like that, instead he grumbled as soon as I walked through the door.

“How are we going to get to the client’s office with you wearing that?”

“It’s only a thirty minute walk. The heels aren’t as uncomfortable as they look.”

“No, no, don’t you realize?” He was starting to get angry. “Time is money. Thirty minutes there and thirty minutes back. That’s an hour of work that you’re not doing.” The joke was very much on him if he believed I had ever worked for an hour straight.

“Okay, well we can always take a cab.”

“In that case, we have to pay money, which is also money.”

Despite working for fairly cheap companies before, I couldn’t believe I was actually working for someone who refused to ride in cabs because they were too expensive. This was all the more strange because I knew he spent hours driving to that stupid Party City to get the plastic vines, and never worried about the impact on revenue. I realized he may have been somewhat drunk for Party City because that happened in the afternoon, but because the client meeting was at 9 AM, he was sober.

I wasn’t sure how he planned to get to the client meeting if both a cab and walking were out of the question. Then again, he also sometimes made people take half days if they had a doctors’ appointment and docked their pay, so I shouldn’t have been too surprised.

“It’ll be a nightmare finding parking, so I won’t drive,” he said.

“How did you...intend to get there?” I asked.

“Bike. We always bike to meetings. You know, when I hired for your role I was planning on either hiring a nice white girl or some nerdy Asian guy, and you’re really making me wish I hired the Asian.”

I knew how to ride a bike, but I hadn’t done it since I was a child. Let alone in a busy city where my only experience with bikes was being inside Ubers that routinely almost hit them. Even if I had been wearing bike shorts and sneakers, I would have objected. I looked to Hiroto for help. He nodded, which felt to me like he did something even though he didn’t.

“I mean…” I stammered. “I agree I can’t wear this to ride a bike, but I barely even know how to ride a bike.”

“You need to learn then,” Dan said. “This is our main form of transportation.”

Sexual harassment was one thing, but I drew the line at taking bike classes, if such a thing existed. This was simply a line I wouldn’t cross. I didn’t even know how to drive, so in order to ride a bike in a city I presumably would also need to learn to drive a car, or at least learn traffic laws. This was a tremendous burden for a job that also sucked quite a bit.

After the client meeting, I spoke with Hiroto and told him there was no circumstance in which I would regularly ride bikes to client meetings. He told me I was safe, and it wasn’t actually expected of me. It never came up again. But I did know one thing--this mojito mixer would have to run perfectly, because I could only imagine Dan’s wrath if it didn’t.

One of the most challenging aspects of the mojito mixer was finding people to invite. It was easy to invite our existing local clients, although since they were already working with us it was unlikely to create a bunch of new sales opportunities. I invited all our prospects too, but because they were already ignoring my emails it was unlikely they’d suddenly jump at the opportunity to meet me in person, even for mojitos. Dan was strict about not opening the invite to the general public because then a bunch of losers would show up. As one of those losers who regularly surfed Eventbrite for startup-related mixers that provided free alcohol, I acknowledged he was probably right about this. At least I was able to score a “yes” from Nick, who I was allowed to invite because at the time he worked for a startup that could have passed as a prospect.

When Dan saw the RSVP list of “yes” responses--about four people (including Nick)--he predictably freaked out. He asked why I didn’t invite more people. I said I did, but most of our prospects weren’t in San Francisco and it was unlikely anyone would travel for this. He asked about our current clients--I said again, I invited them but they mostly RSVPed no. The party was in a week. I decided I would have to traipse around WeWork, inviting random people who worked at startups to come. Dan wouldn’t have time to research everyone who was coming, he would just be happy that we had more RSVPs. It was a bad idea, but it was the only idea I had. If only four people came to the mixer, I was almost guaranteed to get fired.

One big obstacle to this plan was that if I was out of our WowTag office for more than thirty minutes, Dan got mad. I knew this because once after a meeting I wound up in the common area for about half an hour because I ran into a few people from other companies on our floor and we had a conversation. When I returned to the office that time, Dan was furious. So I couldn’t have that happen again. I had to do this on a day that Dan had taken PTO to watch soccer at home (his official reason was “back pain” but Hiroto told me that usually meant soccer).

Walking the halls asking for RSVPs proved to be somewhat effective: I was able to at least get a couple irrelevant freeloaders to agree to come to the mixer, including some people who owned an app that reminded you to stay off your phone. Dan barely knew anything about our prospects or who was on my list, so for all he knew, these people were legit. I just told them to claim they were interested in finding Japanese customers when they arrived, and nobody would know. Surely the prospect of free mojitos would be enough to entice them.

On the day of the dreaded international mojito mixer, Nick arrived early. This was good and bad: good, because I needed his support for this, and bad, because it underscored the theory that I had invited my own husband to thicken the invite list (a theory that was completely true). Nick and I had some mojitos while Dan stood at the bar, mixing a giant pitcher of mojitos that I suspected would still be half full by the time the party was over. What a disaster.

There was one important benefit to throwing this party in a WeWork common area–anyone could show up. Of course, “officially” that wasn’t what we wanted, because we only wanted potential clients to show up. But of course, having a bunch of people show up would be good for the perception of a party.

As I stood next to Nick, mojito in hand, eyes fixated on the front door like a kid whose deadbeat dad was forty minutes late to her school play, I realized the party was already halfway “over” and only one person from our RSVP list had shown up other than Nick. That one person was one of the losers I had invited to pad the list. I looked at Dan to gauge how angry he was, but much to my surprise, he wasn’t angry at all: he was drunk.

For all the contingency plans I had, I had never once thought that Dan would get completely wasted, oblivious to how pitiful our party was because he was too hopped up on happy juice. Dan had drunk almost the entire pitcher of mojitos and was having a rowdy conversation about soccer with some guy who had just walked in with his laptop to work in the common area. Although nobody else from our RSVP list showed up, I did see two freeloaders arrive, and this was impressive because they didn’t even work in the building so I’m not sure how they found out about it. They were well into their fifties and dressed like accountants, which stood out in a WeWork environment like a goth at a country club. They managed to hold Nick hostage in a conversation about vague “business topics” that now has me thinking they didn’t even work in the tech industry at all, but thought they would need to fool Nick of all people to avoid being removed from the party.

As I looked at our party--Nick, some guys, and one guy who didn’t even know we were throwing a party--I turned to Dan. He shot me a smile.

“Great job,” he said. “This was such a blast.”

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