Impostor Syndrome

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3

ALICE

Alice Lu was on her hands and knees, crouched under a table.

The table – custom built and the size of a queen mattress – was in the office of Sean Dara and Johan Frandsen, the founders of FreeTalk. The two men shared a single office (one of Tangerine’s largest) as a testament to their first headquarters, a guesthouse in Cupertino. Alice, who was there to fix their phones, had just started to work when she was suddenly paralyzed by a cold fear.

On the ground, a nest of cables in her hands, she was level with the men’s legs and feet. Alice concentrated on breathing, her field of vision contracting and sharpening, as she focused on what appeared to be the hardened spiral end of a burrito. Having suffered earlier panic attacks, she theoretically understood that the headache, sweating hands, violent drumming in her chest, these would all pass – and though she was currently convinced of an impending and unavoidable doom, that such doom would not occur, unless there was, like, an earthquake or something. There’d been that time in AP Calculus when she thought she’d bombed her final and would thus fall short of the 4.5 GPA necessary for East Asians to qualify for the Ivy League’s holy trifecta, H-Y-P (Harvard, Yale, Princeton); the one-week period when she’d been rejected by all three anyway, and the agonizing wait for the remaining choice not devastating to her parents, MIT. These, Alice knew now, had been stupid reasons to panic, whereas her present justifications were more reasonable.

These were, in chronological order:

1. that just six months prior, she’d actually been employed on the FreeTalk team, in a more senior position than the one she held now, where she had worked alongside her boyfriend of ten years, Jimmy Chiang, and;

2. following a series of s****l harassment suits, Tangerine announced a policy by which employees in a relationship could no longer work on the same team, triggering Alice to apply for a transfer, and;

3. due to a cultural propensity for rule following, which had also prompted her haste to transfer, Alice had accepted a role within technical support, generally acknowledged to be the lowest caste of engineering, but this was no problem, because inspired by the entrepreneurial zest of Sean and Johan, Jimmy planned to start his own company, at which Alice would serve as employee number 2, upon which:

4. Jimmy had left to start his own company, but had also dumped Alice at the same time, stranding her with a two-bedroom apartment in one of the most inflated rental markets in the country, meaning:

5. that despite worrying for so many years about the grades and the recruiting and the résumé-ing Alice had still managed to mess up her career, for the dumbest reason of all, and:

6. when she’d walked into their office just now, neither Sean nor Johan had recognized her, even though she’d personally presented to them twice.

In Alice’s estimation, the last point was the least objectionable – the founders were considered princes of a sort within Tangerine, with the fleeting attention span accorded to celebrities, and she’d been a late transfer onto their team, following Jimmy’s lead. Her ex-boyfriend had been enamored with Sean and Johan, who seemed to inspire a near-religious devotion among the male engineer set: the former in his mid-thirties, a vaper who collected Harley-Davidsons and referred to watches as timepieces; the latter forty-something, ex-eBay, a Scandinavian with five children and chickens in his backyard.

Sometime that morning Johan had entered the office and, attempting to make a call, found no dial tone. Johan had then texted Bryce Childs, the CTO, who directed the problem to the only woman on his team, Tara Lopez, upon which Tara had done the same.

‘It’s quite possibly an excellent opportunity for networking’ was how Tara presented things. ‘It’s really in the chance encounters that personal connections are made.’

Alice knew Tara likely didn’t recall that Alice had already enjoyed months of proximity to Sean and Johan, which had clearly not served her career to any great benefit; additionally, were there any opportunities to be had Alice knew it would be Tara swooping in, instead of dispatching a reliable minion. Though Alice hadn’t argued. First, because she rarely pushed against authority, but also because weeks earlier she’d had her biannual review, seated across from Tara in the same office from which she’d been ordered to Sean and Johan’s.

‘I don’t like to give a bad rating to anyone,’ Tara saying, even though Tangerine’s stack ranking meant she had to do exactly this, twice a year. Her bracelets clacking as she spoke, a framed certificate from Stanford Business School’s Executive Education Program equidistant between them on her desk. ‘Especially not the only woman on my team.’

‘Can I ask why I’m not meeting expectations?’ Alice had asked meekly.

Tara nodded. ‘You might be surprised. As obviously you’re technically proficient.’ Which Alice understood to be neutral to negative in Tara’s universe, as Tara did not respect technical proficiency, given that she had none herself. She had come from human resources, was rotating through the company via its Female Leadership Program (internally referred to as FLIP, as in FLIP! the gender ratios). ‘Engineering acumen is valuable. But to thrive on my team, you must also demonstrate what’s referred to as soft skills.’

‘Is this because I didn’t attend the last team builder?’ Which had been the Monday after Jimmy left; Alice had spent it at home, watching Grave of the Fireflies.

‘This isn’t about one thing,’ Tara said crossly. ‘It’s more a question of cultural fit.’ It’s cultural: that explanation all liberal Americans were obligated to accept without question, which Alice had deployed for years to get out of eating turkey on Thanksgiving and wearing swimsuits in public.

Alice knew the next question expected from her. ‘How do I improve?’

‘Be more present. Empower yourself!’ Tara liked positivity, and words like empowerment and aware; when she spoke them it was as if she imagined herself onstage, in front of a participatory audience.

Now Alice was inches from Johan’s Birkenstocks; from the way he was freely scratching at his upper thighs and even higher, he had definitely forgotten she was here. She desperately wished for some guidance on how to empower herself in this situation.

‘Did you see this latest from Julia?’ Sean called. He had a seamless voice, the kind used for voice-over work in commercials. ‘She’s making the case that we should report to her, that FreeTalk should be in her organization. She claims it’ll be more efficient. From an engineering perspective. I think half the time the b***h doesn’t understand what she’s talking about.’

‘Sean. You cannot say words like “b***h” anymore.’

‘You know Pierre’s going to cave. We can get out. Do a new thing. I hate this corporate shit.’

‘We don’t fully vest for another year.’ Johan’s voice was crisp and robotic. ‘It is not much to wait, in the scheme of life.’

‘Oh, Jesus.’ Sean’s boots batted each other in agitation. ‘What do you need the stock for? I thought you were all about modest living. Driving around in your minivan.’

‘That doesn’t mean I don’t respect money,’ Johan said primly. ‘As I recall, you made the final decision to sell.’

‘I know, I know. I was greedy. But now I’ve got regrets, okay? So how do I f*****g repent?’

From underneath the desk, Alice briefly pondered whether she was doing something in her own life equivalent to bitching about a nine-figure stock grant – if working at Tangerine automatically notched her on a sliding scale of privilege and offense. Each month, as penitence for her corporate-paid lunch and on-campus juice bar, she made an automatic donation to Médecins Sans Frontières; in exchange she was deluged by phone calls and mailers containing preprinted address labels that guilted her into donating even more.

There was a pause in the chatter, and she forced herself out from under the table. ‘Okay,’ she said in her most confident tone, the one she used to negotiate her Comcast bill. ‘Does one of you have a dog?’

It was obvious she’d been forgotten: Sean was studying her with a mix of calculation and concern, while twin daubs of rose had bloomed on Johan’s cheeks. ‘A dog,’ Alice repeated loudly, which she thought might make her seem innocuous, a slow sort cheered by large animals.

‘A dog?’ Johan finally echoed, still struggling to make eye contact. ‘Yes, I have a dog. A mountain dog.’ Then, as if this were an embarrassing revelation: ‘I bought him for my children.’

‘Do you bring it to work?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Well, it’s been chewing on the cords. It ate the phone cord down to the wire, so that’s why it doesn’t work.’

‘Oh,’ Johan said. ‘Okaaaay.’

‘So I suggest that if you want to bring your dog in the future, you keep it away from electronics.’ Alice gestured with both hands toward the frayed wire, as if she were a game-show host. ‘I can order a tube, if you want. It’ll go around the wires so that a dog can’t chew through them.’

‘But then won’t the dog just chew through the tube?’ Johan asked.

‘How big is it?’

‘He is a good size,’ Johan said, holding a hand level with his waist. ‘In America, dogs are too small.’

‘Housing is expensive,’ Alice said. ‘Not everyone has the space.’

The two men exchanged a look, as if silently conferring over the source of a foul odor.

‘Okay,’ Alice said. She was already regretting her comment about housing; she knew from her limited interactions with the rich and powerful that it was nearly impossible to say anything without having it come out worse than in your head. ‘You can tell your admin if you change your mind about the tube. I’ll have a new cord sent.’ She gathered her laptop, her pen, the notepad she had uselessly taken out and not opened.

‘Jesus,’ she heard Sean exhale as she left. ‘Wow.’

‘Sean,’ Johan warned, and then the door shut, and the rest of their conversation was lost.

alice returned to her desk. With the exception of executives, all Tangerine employees worked from ‘open seating’: long tables split by acrylic dividers set five feet apart. To Alice’s left sat Sam Diaz, who ran a side business designing skateboards and scheduled fake ‘working groups’ at four p.m. to beat the traffic home to Scotts Valley. To her right was Larry Chan, whom she suspected of an extended campaign of shifting the divider between them millimeters at a time, until he’d acquired enough space for a third LCD. It was late afternoon, which meant the sun had mostly fled, along with the parents who announced they had school pickup or swim meets to attend. Work-life balance and all that, which coincidentally was one of Tara’s favorite topics, except that Alice didn’t have children or, if she was being honest, much of a life. Instead, in the evenings she would work until seven and then drive home. Greet her roommate, Cheri, if she was around, and then hasten to her room and eat dinner while watching TV on her computer. Alice liked this routine. It was what she’d done when she was in a relationship, except the TV watching had been in the living room, her and Jimmy on the couch with their laptops.

Her computer chimed. Before Alice had left for Sean and Johan’s she’d begun a scan of a random block of servers. This was housekeeping each of Tara’s employees was supposed to perform, but rarely actually did, just one cohort of an entire legion of neglected activities. When she’d first started in support Alice had been surprised by the laxity of Tangerine’s protocols, how much of the back end was just a bunch of crappy code strung together. After her review with Tara, however, Alice had begun performing the scans with furious regularity.

She checked the report. There was high activity in one of the servers, the graph spiking in a jagged Matterhorn. Server 251, located in the Dublin data center. Alice closed her eyes for a few seconds, hoping that the issue, whatever it was, might resolve itself. Sometimes that happened – the systems were like humans, in that occasionally they behaved out of character and then stopped on their own.