When I Worked in Big Tech and Everyone Fucking Hated Me

My wake up call to stop being such an unlikable person

What follows is a true story, but a few identifying details have been changed (especially the company name—so don’t bother Googling it, it’s not real.)

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Yesterday, I wrote about how I have a hard time getting people to attend my parties. Well, I’m about to tell you about the journey that led to an especially disastrous party—the thing that prompted me to teach myself social skills.

I was twenty-seven when I first got the job offer to work at Skeeter, a global chat and video messaging tech giant. I couldn’t believe it. I had gotten job offers before but Skeeter was on the list of the big tech companies where I’d always wanted to work, companies I thought would never hire me. Although I had no aspirations to be a big name in tech one day, I did like that Skeeter had a reputation for paying well and providing outstanding benefits and perks. Not to mention if you had Skeeter on your resume, you could work anywhere.

Why was I so sure Skeeter would never hire me? Well, probably because I was lazy and bad at jobs. Not that I advertised these facts about me, but I felt that people would just “know.” The people who got jobs at Skeeter were the type whose entire purpose was working, people who took courses and went to networking events in their free time, people who didn’t even care if a company function had free croissant sandwiches because that “wasn’t the point.”

But there I was, with an offer letter from Skeeter. I’d be making significantly more money than in my previous job. I would get benefits that I previously only dreamed of. As I struggled to understand why I was getting this offer, I kept reminding myself of “imposter syndrome,” which I now realize, in my case, was a coping mechanism for actually being really, tremendously, bad at my jobs.

There was only one problem with Skeeter that almost made me walk away. For some psychotic reason, starting my employment at Skeeter required me to travel to another state for a week’s orientation, and then a secondary location for another two weeks of training. They offered to fly me back home for weekends, but that would have almost no effect on my OCD, which revolved around a fear of being away from my husband, Nick, often zooming in on a hypothetical scenario where he choked on a sandwich and didn’t have anyone to administer CPR. (Did I know CPR? No. Did that matter to my OCD? Also no.) Nick, however, pushed me to go, especially since he could come with me for the first week since he also had business in the first city. Skeeter wouldn’t pay for his flight, of course, but they’d tolerate him being in my hotel room, which was as good as it was going to get.

The Skeeter HQ was a giant white building that looked like something out of a young adult dystopian novel where a sinister sorting ceremony might be conducted. From there, all of us new “Skeets” were given infantile lanyards and asked to pose for headshots. Those headshots were then printed out and added to the lanyards. No way was I wearing this stupid thing throughout orientation. I had picked out my outfit that day (red Uniqlo blouse, black Zara jacket) specifically to look cool, and the aqua lanyard was making me look like an idiot.

Although I was there for orientation, a big part of me was also there to make friends. I didn’t have a lot of friends in my city, being somewhat new in town (and being, well, annoying), and if I hit it off with some people around my age at orientation, I’d have that effortlessly built-in group of friends I desperately needed. All I had to do was make people like me.