Uncanny Valley

by Anna Wiener

“So,” he said, as if he were asking me to let him in on a secret, “how would you calculate the number of people who work for the United States Postal Service?” We sat in silence for a moment. I wouldn’t, I thought; I would look it up on the internet.

“Make it so that they’ll have no option but to promote you,” he advised. Who was “they,” I wondered—wasn’t “they” him?

“Don’t hire anyone worse than you,” the CEO instructed. He meant this as a compliment. The CEO and

The founders had hired her, she once told me, because they knew she would get things done, and the founders had been right: she quietly ran the show. I didn’t know why this skill set should be any less valued, culturally or monetarily, than the ability to write a Rails app.

“Lol,” he said, not laughing. Ha ha, I said. Not laughing.

“He doesn’t care about you,” Ian said. “You’re the smallest problem in his life. You’re allowed to quit. He’ll be fine.”

We’re all just reading from someone else’s script.

What I wanted in a workplace was simple. I wanted to trust my manager. To receive fair and equal compensation. To not feel weirdly bullied by a twenty-five-year-old. To put some faith in a system—any system would do—for accountability. To take it all much less personally, and not get too close.

I wanted to find a way, while I could, to engage with my own life.

I could have stayed in my job forever, which was how I knew it was time to go. The money and the ease of the lifestyle weren’t enough to mitigate the emotional drag of the work: the burnout, the repetition, the intermittent toxicity. The days did not feel distinct.