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Two

S elf-reinvention is trickier than getting autocorrect to stop changing my profanity to “ducking.”

Six months after the ignominy of my wrong-name, under-the-pier termination, I’m floundering.

I flirt with possible jobs on Monster.com like working is the new hookup.

You look good, yes, I’d like to meet up—no need to bother with “get to know you” chitchat.

I’ve connected with multiple workplaces, but TripFriendz, my current place of temporary employment, is starting to look like a long-term relationship.

We’ve made it past the coffee meetup.

The dinner bang.

The awkward morning-after texts and performance review.

TripFriendz likes me and I love having a job again.

I know what to do next. I have a plan . I’ll make work friends, lead a team, effortlessly scale up the project, and shake out more bugs than Moses in Egypt. I’ll be the go-to person San Francisco’s hottest tech firm wants, begs for, can’t do without, and they’ll like me back.

They’ll KNOW WHO I AM .

Yes, I’ve printed this out in 124-point font and stuck it on my fridge.

It’ll be a walk in the (technology) park.

It says wonderful things about my ability to focus that when Noah and Enzo race by my desk with wall-shattering speed on their scooters, I barely look up.

I do, however, press Command+S and wrap a protective arm around my laptop.

It’s great that my team members have taken to heart the American Heart Association’s exhortations to get up and stretch every hour, but it adversely affects our productivity that they’ve broken two laptops, unplugged a critical server, and forced me to pull backup tapes not once but twice this week.

“Outside!” I bark before I catch myself.

Then I remind myself to smile, even if it’s more of a grimace that looks like gas.

Don’t sound critical. Be friendly! One of the guys!

I (somewhat, mostly) love my newest team, but it’s crystal clear that I’ll never be the fun parent.

That role has been permanently awarded to Margie, the woman I am temporarily replacing as chief play officer.

She oversees a team of software engineers, providing creative vision and direction for new features.

She’s God or Mother Nature, picking and choosing which DNA molecules make it into the app that TripFriendz is gestating.

TripFriendz is her baby and it will look like her.

Except that now it’s starting to seem like it might, quite possibly, be mine.

Margie is cruising around the world and/or writing the book of her heart in a Blue Ridge Mountains cabin with a lumberjack.

Yoga might be involved. She’s been vague about the specifics, which has sent the office rumor mill into overdrive, but she’s deeply missed by everyone who’s met her.

They hate her blatant hints at retirement.

I, on the other hand, am thrilled.

Hello, Opportunity. So pleased to meet you.

“Do you want a turn?” Noah pops a wheelie on his scooter, making another pass by me.

I don’t have a death wish. “Let me check on the status of my insurance first.”

He tries again. “Tomorrow?”

Noah is a perpetual oxford-shirt-wearing optimist. He pairs his positive outlook with blue jeans and flip-flops.

Noah hasn’t believed in socks since he was a teenager in Buffalo, New York, and the balmier weather of Northern California is a blessing.

He tells me this frequently, usually while asking for (our unlimited) time off to jet off to even balmier, more tropical locations for vacation.

The only traveling I do is between the office and my loft condo.

I relocate my laptop to the back of my desk and stand up. Today’s your day! Smile , the sticky note stuck to my screen exhorts me. I smile. “What’s up?”

“Hot lead on a new travel partner. Big commission dollars.” Noah stabs a thumb at Enzo, who is disappearing through the doors that lead to the elevator and the outside world. Go, Enzo, go. The software app we’re building is no good if no one agrees to sell their hotel rooms on our site.

TripFriendz’s office space was formerly a tobacco warehouse in a grittier-than-is-desirable part of San Francisco.

The exposed brickwork in our open floor plan workspace is pretty, but walls and cell phone reception are nonexistent.

Since our NASA-worthy landline phones require a Mensa-level IQ to operate, Enzo took sales calls in the days of Margie while hanging out the window (where Spider-Man-worthy athletics equate to a meager bar of cell phone service).

Since coming on board, I’ve successfully argued that plummeting two stories down onto the sidewalk is a financial liability our start-up cannot afford.

Ergo, Enzo now races outside whenever he needs an uninterrupted phone call.

“Good luck!” I chirp at Enzo’s back. I am such a team player. Smile! Be positive! New lines bracket my mouth, carving themselves into my skin. I have no idea what I’ll do if they fire me.

Neither Noah nor Enzo acknowledge my supportive attitude.

Enzo disappears to take his very important call and Noah scoots off toward the free chocolate that is couriered over to our community kitchen each afternoon from the organic hippy grocery store our CEO patronizes.

We have an endless supply of flavors, like lavender blueberry sunshine smiles and hemp quinoa fiber-filled chocolate pistachio.

I’d follow him—free chocolate is excellent team-bonding material—but picking quinoa out of my teeth will not instill confidence in my professional skills.

Rosie, our intern, pokes her head around the corner. “Oh, good. You’re awake.”

Margie was a big fan of nap time. Essential, appetitive, fulfillment, caffeine, power, siesta—she took and endorsed them all.

Miraculously, we’re only eleven months behind on the TripFriendz launch.

“Please tell me we’re making the code release in eight weeks.” Rosie wanders around my desk like a lost puppy and slumps down onto the exercise ball jammed in next to my ergonomic office chair.

Fun fact: I am the only adult who sits in an actual chair here.

We have fifty-four days, seven hours, and twenty-nine minutes until release, but who’s counting?

I opt for brevity. “Yes.”

It’s not lying—it’s optimistic thinking. Manifestation. A desperate prayer to the universe. When I checked twenty minutes ago, there were 741 open tickets in our bug tracking software. They need me here too much to get rid of me.

Rosie makes puppy dog eyes at me, flashing heart hands.

“Would you lie to me?” She tries to laser inside my brain with her eyes. “Because we were supposed to code freeze three months ago, and I have more bugs than a squirrel does fleas. Are we feature complete?”

She’s so naive. “We don’t have a product spec.”

Like unicorns, warp drives, and the zero-bug state, an actual product spec—the list of stuff that’s supposed to be in the finished TripFriendz app—does not exist.

She shrugs, rolling effortlessly on the ball thanks to her youthful obliques. “So we have creative license?”

What we have is an epic disaster. I am not a creative person.

Or even a traveler. As a perpetually single person, I don’t have someone to go anywhere with in real life.

Vacation packages are terra incognita. Still, as I desperately covet Margie’s job (or any job), I’m singlehandedly rewriting most of the app, making it up as I go along.

“This is a software start-up, not a fanfic forum.”

“We could make a fortune writing Reylo fan fiction! We could go out for tacos and brainstorm?” Rosie is now doing crunches on the exercise ball. Space lasers from my laptop announce another bug joining its companions in my queue.

I suspect we’ve missed the opportunity to monetize the dubious relationship between Rey and Kylo Ren, but staying open-minded is important, particularly when it comes to employment opportunities.

I had to grovel my way into this temp job because it’s hard to make “terminated” sound like “was not my fault” and/or “really talented programmer, available immediately.”

“I can’t today. We have the product demo for the VCs and the director of engineering in two weeks,” I remind her.

We’re supposed to showcase TripFriendz’s features.

Worse: those features are supposed to be fully functional.

To psych myself up, I review the company website while Rosie brainstorms inappropriate sexual fantasies about Rey out loud.

My name is not listed on the site. Margie’s is.

As is Rosie’s (“Happiness Engineer-in-Training”) and Noah’s (“Innovation Engineer”).

Pandora Fyffe, Chief Play Officer. That will be me. I’ll rock it. I’ll be on one of those thirty-under-thirty lists that I screenshot in Cosmo magazine and pin on my digital inspiration board. It’s a vague but heartfelt plan.

Oblivious to my career goals, Rosie sits upright. She’s all joints and bendy bits. There’s not a bone in her body. “What features are in the demo? Do they have to work?”

Her questions confirm why I will be leading the demo.

“All of them. Yes. Search engine, booking engine, AI-driven recommendations based on the user’s history,” I tell her. Not for the first time. “The goal being that you and your friends can book an itinerary that has been customized just for you.”

“Like a dating app.” Rosie bounces gently in place. “But for group sex? But maybe without sex and with a preplanned perfect date. Like…masturbation? So not like a dating app at all.”

She scrunches her face up, lost in her workplace-inappropriate metaphor.

“For travel,” I say firmly. “Just travel. Places, not people. Companions are not included.”

The space lasers sound again. Our launch draws further and further out of reach.

Rosie planks, still musing, “Do you think the VCs are going to pull our funding?”

Not if I have anything to say about it.

“I’m bringing this app to market,” I vow.

Rosie serves the conversational ball back to me. “What would your perfect trip look like?”

“I hate traveling.”

There are no hotels in the Crystal Cluster Cosmos. There are no airports, no single supplements, and no sympathetic looks when I request a table for one. My virtual spaceship has just one seat, all mine.

Rosie is oblivious. “Where would you go if you could go anywhere?”

My beloved spaceship beckons. There are so many galaxies I could explore if I only had more time.

“Nowhere.” I shut down the conversation. “I’m staying right here. At home.”

Or at work, rather. I work at home and sleep at work when I’m pulling an all-nighter, and the boundaries blurred ages ago.

“You don’t want to travel?” Now Rosie sounds horrified. I have maligned our baby, rejected TripFriendz’s reason for being. I have singlehandedly jinxed our launch. “Shonda would say yes to travel.”

I am almost certain there is no one by the name of Shonda employed at TripFriendz. “Who?”

“Shonda Rhimes,” Rosie says. She mimes ecstatic excitement. Shonda is her hero. Heroine?

“You should say yes more,” Rosie urges. She texts me a link to an illegal download of Shonda’s book. “Let’s do the Shonda method! You say yes to everything for a year!”

Has she met me?

The answer to that is a Shonda-approved yes, because she promptly amends her previous statement. “Or maybe just try to be more like Shonda? But without the creative vision and the whole I’m-a-household-name thing? It’ll be fun.”

I’m the least impulsive person ever. “Can you make me a slide deck? Pitch it to me next week?”

“Just try it.” She mouths YES. Then points to me. “Would you like to take a trip?”

I give agreement a shot. “Okay, yes. I’d like a vacation.”

It’s a weak answer.

Rosie pulls a face. She wants adjectives. Florid descriptions. An entire novel of a conversation. “With your boyfriend? Sister? Mom?”

She means: don’t you have any friends?

Try harder , I urge myself. You’re not being likeable. “Maybe you and I can travel around Asia together?”

Rosie nods. She’s willing for us to travel tag team style.

In my fantasy world, I indulge in travel documentaries rather than actual travel. I lurk on Pinterest rather than in hotel rooms and take contactless take-out delivery rather than urban food tours. Also acceptable: a housekeeper who zips in unnoticed and a moat for keeping out intruders.

Perhaps I should buy a fixer-upper castle in England?

I assign the newest bug to Rosie and excuse myself to go hide in the restroom.