When I Went to a Bogus Conference to Look Important
My boss told me I needed to "seem" like a hard worker. So I signed up for a totally bullshit conference.
What follows is another true story about my career in tech, similar to When I Worked in Big Tech and Everyone Fucking Hated Me and I Threw The Worst Networking Event of All Time.
I had been at Zapify for about a year before I heard something I hoped I would never hear: “There’s a conference in Las Vegas.”
At that moment, I genuinely hoped one of those North Korean ballistic missiles I kept incessantly googling would hit the entire Zapify office, killing me immediately (preferably only me somehow–I mean, this wasn’t anyone else’s problem). But to my and Kim Jong Un’s chagrin, nothing happened. I sat in front of my computer staring at the unforgiving words on my Slack channel. Las Vegas. Conference.
Predictably, my sales colleagues Derek and Jim were thrilled because they wanted to go to Las Vegas. I, on the other hand, was terrified and on the verge of quitting solely over this. Work travel was easily my number-one fear, fueled by my OCD. My OCD often made no sense: I regularly drank strangers’ half-empty drinks left over in bars, and I never worried once about getting roofied, but I was 100% certain that if I went on a work trip and left my husband Nick to fend for himself, he’d electrocute himself on a counterfeit iPhone charger and I wouldn’t be there to call 911.
The person who suggested this Las Vegas conference was our interim boss, Fred. My previous boss Ji-hoon had recently quit, and Fred was filling in for Ji-hoon until we could find a replacement. I didn’t have the close relationship with Fred that I had with Ji-hoon, so I wasn’t sure what to say to get out of this. Instead of telling him the truth about my OCD, something I had successfully kept under wraps for the past year at Zapify, I simply vomited multiple different excuses all at once: “Actually I think Nick and I are going out of town that weekend, and besides, I looked at the attendance list and none of my clients are going. Also, my childhood dog might be getting put down in a few months.” (Okay, I didn’t actually say that last one, but that’s only because my childhood dog had been put down the previous year and I had already milked it for all it was worth.)
My coworker Derek messaged me privately and said “Just so you know, if I were Fred, I would not be happy with that answer.” I kind of couldn’t believe he said that to me. Who even cared? He wasn’t my boss and if anything, me doing something to look stupid should have been a net positive for him, because he’d look better in comparison.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because you just immediately jumped to all the reasons you can’t do it. It makes it seem like you just aren’t taking it seriously.”
I thought about telling Derek about my anxiety, but he didn’t seem like the kind of person who would understand. I didn’t think he was the right audience for airing my mental health concerns. (Honestly, this was a major moment of growth for me because up until that year I probably would have started crying and told him everything, then asked him if he was mad at me every day for the next eight months.)
The conversation came to a head with Fred when, during our 1:1, he mentioned he had received feedback that I was doing “non-work related things at work” including but not limited to “going on Facebook.” Not far off from the Reddit-related feedback I had received from Ji-hoon.
