The Project Team Will Now Introduce Themselves
By Bryn Dodson
The project manager starts to say it looks like everyone is on and the meeting can begin.
A beep interrupts.
This is Brad, says Brad.
Oh, hi, Brad, says the project manager, great timing, we were just about to do introductions.
A dog barks. A child whines. On a separate call a husband speaks in his bland phone voice. The project manager mutes her mic, holds back a breath that threatens to escape as static. She unmutes, laughs, and says, I guess I’ll start!
Hi, I’m Maria, and I’ll be managing this project, which in practice means I’ll be in a state of low-grade enmity with everyone here. From my perspective, the project will consist in being crushed between the walls of a very large and very slow-moving vise, in which I will stand shouting at people to push in one direction or the other before the walls close. To the project team, all of you on the client side will remain a distant obstruction wrecking their beautifully laid plans, and to you I’ll be the prophet of doom, the bearer of dreadful news about budgets and deadlines, and believe me, if I could shove all these people out of the way and do the work myself, if I could sit down after everyone else has gone home and just do the fucking work, that is what I would do for you, my client. And honestly I would very much like that, no longer having a dozen little egos to stroke and a clutch of spreadsheets to maintain, whose main function is to hide the fact that I’m as helpless as a baby bird in a nest, waiting for scraps of work to be shoved in my mouth.
The other day I was taking a shower, and somehow a drop of water got onto the other side of the glass and was trickling down. I went to wipe it away and I couldn’t, obviously, but I tried again, and then a third time, and I burst into tears. Now I’d say I cry at or about work semi-regularly, so this was not totally a new place for me, but this time I wasn’t reacting to being yelled at, I’d just seen something that captured my predicament so perfectly that I was overwhelmed by it. It’s dangerous to feel sorry for yourself, and I was shocked to find that some part of me held so much self-pity despite my wishes.
But other than hectoring people into doing their jobs, I am also tasked with building relationships with all of you, work which I am actually quite good at and which mostly consists of feeling two incompatible sets of feelings simultaneously. I will tell the project team over and over, you have to do the work but they have to live with the work, so listen to their feedback no matter how misguided or ridiculous you might find it. But I also feel the pain, on behalf of my own team, of watching clients mess things up, watching them parade around utterly deranged suggestions and treat them as brilliant because they happened to think of them—it’s an obscene spectacle, like seeing a pug wrapped in a Communion dress and paraded around to be adored, a crazy lie in plain sight.
But possibly the worst part of my job is absorbing both perspectives, project team and client, so completely that in the course of two separate conversations I feel totally simpatico first with the project team, then with the client, only to discover I’ve disappointed everyone and I still feel exactly what each side is feeling, to the point that I’m not sure what I feel anymore, except that I feel deeply, devoutly worthless—but there’s no time for that because the emails don’t stop coming, do they? Which is to say, I’m excited to get started on this project and really looking forward to working with y’all!
The project manager finishes. It is unclear who will introduce themselves next. The quiet stretches out.
The project manager is waiting, breathing quickly, for Diana to speak.
Finally she says curtly: All right, Brad, why don’t you go next, since you were last on.
Brad turns on his camera. He sits in a constricting-looking gaming chair in racing colors. Headphones tamp down his hair, which is unbrushed, and deep shadows form around his deep-set eyes. Small fluorescent suns bloom on his cheeks.
Hi all, Brad. Data guy.
Brad blinks off screen, muting himself. Polite laughter from the client team. He reappears, letting himself show a touch of amusement.
Nice background, Brad, says one of the client team by way of encouragement.
Brad’s background is the command deck of the Enterprise being rocked by torpedo fire, redshirts being tossed across the vaulting space as crew members plunge into cover, enemy spaceships swarming and beyond a careless arrangement of nebulae and stars.
Heh, yeah, I’m not a big Trekkie but I think it captures life at the moment pretty nicely, everyone being thrown around like that.
Well, look it’s great to meet you all, it’s nice that people want to hear from me. My last job, I was Data Guy to everyone. I used to work with this woman who heard someone call me Brad at drinks, and she leaned close to me and said, Now I know your name I’m going to drink until I forget it. Can’t humanize you too much. She clearly knew my name because she always messaging me when she needed something, but she always treated me just like that.
Sometimes being Data Guy is kind of like being a big guy, a heavyset guy. You know how some chill big guys are trouble magnets? People wanna know, can I take the big guy, and sometimes it’s the man with the MBA who wants to know. So he’ll say there’s an error here or I think the data says X when you’re saying it says Y. And sometimes he’s right, sometimes he’s not—nobody’s perfect—but you can tell how much it means to him, to get one over the Data Guy.
The closer you get to numbers, the more people’s ideas about you become one with the numbers. I’m a big Ultimate Frisbee guy, and every so often someone asks me about my weekend, and I might be telling him about a play from the game, and they just cut me off. They just don’t want to change the way they think about you—that’s what it is. So when people take an interest, I worry I’ve misread the situation and I’m just crapping on—excuse me—like now.
Anyway, because my last job was like that, the little things mean a lot, like people wanting to hear from you. And it’s good to meet you, and I’m pleased to see you have your own Data Guy, although he’s probably going to be difficult, Data Guys are territorial by nature, they need their own space to roam about in, and he’s probably terrified of getting fired and he’ll most likely compensate for it by attacking everything I do. Looking forward to it.
One member of the client team has put on her camera and is peering into the lens. Her tortoiseshell glasses have elaborate horned endpieces and she is so poorly lit her age is indeterminate. After minutes of squinting into this aperture she forgets it is there, turning up and to the left, the camera angled onto a mole on her neck. Behind her is an almost-impressionist painting of a sailboat, but in the dimness of her room the boat appears to be sailing in the dark.
Danika? says the project manager.
Hi! I’m Danika, says Danika, slightly breathless, I’ll be responsible for Tactical Strategy, and I just quickly want to say it’s wonderful to meet you all and talk about one moment in my day that’s become very special to me, which is the moment, fifteen minutes before the end of one meeting and the beginning of the next, where everyone’s calendars start chiming at once. My calendar starts chiming and that’s a delicious moment for me, because I know I’m about to hear everyone else’s calendars going crazy through their speakers—warning! warning! a meeting, oh god, a meeting!!—everyone’s calendars flaring up at once. I love the fact that it happens in unison but I get a special warning the half-second before, and I love, love love the way everyone’s calendars try so hard to keep us organized and end up creating this little slice of chaos instead, and that is the time of day I feel most alive.
As Danika finishes a voice is audible. It does not sound like anyone on the call. This voice appears to be a man’s. His tone suggests he is shouting, although he seems some distance from the microphone.
Then the quality of the voice changes—now it sounds plaintive, almost whining. The voice seems to draw closer to the mic and for the first time words and phrases are audible. The voice is saying are you kidding me? are you kidding me? seriously? repeated with the same upward, nasal intonation. Then the voice explodes into everyone’s ears, Motherfucking bitch! motherfucking bitch! motherfucking bitch! motherfuuuuckiiiiing biiiii as the sound slows to a half its normal speed, before sliding into a scream that shades into a rumbling noise before snapping into silence as the microphone is muted.
Everyone sits on mute behind their names.
Diana, finally, takes her turn to speak.
Well, that was a strange interlude, but here we are! Sorry everyone, I couldn’t figure out how to get off mute. I’m Diana, and I’m your point of escalation for this project, which is to say that if something goes wrong—when something goes wrong—you’ll be demanding to speak to me, and I’ll be trying to reassure you at the same time as I’m reassuring half a dozen other clients whose projects are in a similarly parlous state. And the strange thing is, you actually will be reassured, for reasons that I have never yet been able to grasp. As someone that people regularly complain to, it seems to me that everyone who complains is, in their own way, afraid of having broken the banks of the ordinary course of things, afraid that something has flooded and is now out of their control. When I see videos of people freaking out at customer service—and I go out of my way to watch these videos, sometimes the second I get off a difficult client call—I don’t see rage so much as total, encompassing terror. The terror of being less than. The terror of not being treated like a human, but above all the terror of no longer being yourself, as your frustration has flooded into something new and frightening.
Watching these videos you’d think I would sympathize with the person on the receiving end, but I don’t, not at all—there’s an emptiness to all their gestures and reassurances, their sirs and ma’ams, the way they empty themselves to absorb the rage. And while I’ve often had to do that myself, when I watch others do it I can’t empathize. What I get out of that type of video is a cold type of comedy and a secret desire to defect, to join the side of the ragers. But what the ragers seem to want more than anything is for the person receiving the complaint to show them that things can go back to normal—so much so that I’ve resolved more than a few client issues without promising to lift a finger, simply because my demeanor promises a return to normality when they’re finished raging.
So providing a figure who sits in a chair marked Reassuring Person, and having that figure say Yes, yes, these are all valid points, is exactly, inexplicably enough reassurance for everyone except, of course, me. Because the struggle of my career is that I was not considered the kind of figure who might appropriately occupy a chair marked Reassuring Person, lacking the gravitas or, I suppose, the penis. There were many of those days of one against all—days in enemy territory, surrounded by men’s stares, men’s patronizing words, men’s spitting little attacks and propositions that are really attacks. But time does its work, those reassuring penises end up in places they really ought not be, certain frauds are unmasked, and one day the way is suddenly clear and the office door is alluringly open. And then when you walk in and close that door, you find the chair that was never meant for you has absorbed you, that despite the striving and ingenuity it took to bring you here, the chair requires only your voice and your buttocks. This is something that usually goes unremarked, the way the world as you climb higher has a way of requiring less and less of you, whittling away the capacities that vaulted you into your privileged position in the first place. In my experience one has to carry on a daily fight against that, to resist one’s own figureheading, to coin a phrase.
And I resist that ferociously, I promise you! I’ve started endless initiatives to put out the fires before they spread, to stop so many miseries and grievances from making it to my throne. I’ve built so many defenses in an attempt to protect myself, and you. In the process I’ve watched many of my ideas die. In daily life we’re surrounded by ideas with incredible tenacity, most things that reach us have been through some spinmeister or some viral wringer, and it inures us to how fragile ideas really are. Ideas depart quietly and leave nothing when they go. I’ve seen ideas die in the aftermath of bursts of enthusiasm that leave nothing left over. I’ve seen them die the way a smile dies when it’s outworn its use, a lean smile on the face of a flatterer who tells me how hard they tried, but this new way of doing things just won’t stick…
So this has gotten to be a long introduction [laughs] but it is a roundabout way of saying that much as I put my heart into this, the only place where I have the capability to match my self-belief is in this chair, and more and more lately I feel I am the chair and the chair is me, and it is in the chair that I have resigned myself to speaking with you soon, especially as your budget is modest and your requirements are, frankly, outrageous. Great to meet you all.
Maria, do we have anyone else left to introduce?
Silence. The project manager says, I guess I’ll turn it over to your team, Jeni.
Anna cuts in in a small voice, Actually, I haven’t introduced myself, Maria.
Tiredly the project manager says, Oh, Anna. Go ahead.
Okay! Hi everyone—I’m Anna—and to be completely honest with you I don’t know if it’s totally worth me introducing myself because I’m like ninety percent sure I’m about to be fired [laughs]. No one’s said anything—no five o’clock meetings with HR on the calendar—but I can tell from the way everyone talks about my work. There’s always someone being assigned to ‘work with me’ or ‘punch it up’ or ‘get it to a good place’. I’ve made so many ‘strong starts’ that if I make another strong fucking start I swear I am going to vomit on my keyboard. What I desperately wish I could do is ask my manager, straight up, Do you even like me, but I know the answer is no and she won’t be able to hide it, and she’ll stare at me like a trapped animal, and there’ll be nothing left to do except stare at a floor that has so far refused to swallow me up.
They’re putting me on fewer and fewer projects now. But the less I have to do, the more anxious I get about the jobs I do have. I don’t know how to describe it, it’s like time is squeezing me tighter and tighter. The two hours before my fifteen-minute check-in is a python crushing my chest. And then I get so anxious I don’t even know how I’m going to do my check-in, and some part of myself that just—cannot—take—any—fucking—more—of—this says maybe you would feel better if you blew it off. And then for fourteen minutes of this fifteen-minute meeting I’m not attending, I’m just sitting in my chair hyperventilating, and when they message me to ask where the hell I was all I can say is I lost track of time.
I think about being fired all the time, and this may sound insane but when I really need to calm down, I think through all the steps that will be involved in me being fired. I think about the talk with HR and the forms I’ll sign and the updates I’ll make to my LinkedIn and even the kind of bag or box I’ll take back to the office to clean out my desk when no one is around. Other days I scroll Twitter and that’s always a mistake. The articles make me so angry I can’t even think. I’m reading about obstetric fistulas, where girls in poor countries give birth and become incontinent from the damage that’s done to them because they’re literally children themselves, and they go through this terrible experience just to be shunned by the communities that gave them away as brides in the first place. And I’m reading this while I’m in a meeting listening to some old white man drone on about nothing, sitting on mute just paralyzed with the psychopathic wrongness of our fucked-up world. And that is kind of unconducive to taking clear notes.
As a kid, did you ever have the fantasy where time freezes and you’re the only one unstuck, and you can just go around staring in people’s faces, kicking their shins, pulling down their pants, whatever you want? When my internet craps out on a call I get that feeling. Everyone’s glitchy little face freezes and I’m the only one moving, and I feel all-powerful. Then everyone starts moving again and I have to start trying to take notes. Danika made me think of that, when she talked about the notifications.
Notifications stress me out. Shocking, right? [laughs] The little red ‘1’ in a circle looking like a lizard eye. I can feel the person sending the message staring at me like the Eye of Sauron, I’ve fucked up again and they can see everything. I refresh messages constantly but I don’t dare open them, so I’m constantly missing information I needed and actually had. And when the notifications really pile up I feel this high of despair—this feeling like, this is finally it, and I get this shot of adrenaline and this sense of relief, you know, that it’s finally all over, but it never lasts and I go back to panicking.
But the weird thing is. At night, after a couple glasses of wine, sometimes I sit in the dark and I log back in to see my notifications. I’m on my bed with my wine, the curtains are closed, the laptop is the only thing that’s lit in the apartment, it’s all dark. And I just watch. I watch people in other time zones doing their work, messaging each other, getting responses. I like finding people whose jobs sound similar to mine and watching the way they work, and saying to myself, I see you. And from that vantage point it just seems so peaceful. Everything goes round and round. Everything gets done. When I’m a little tipsy it truly feels like what we do is beautiful, and I wish I could put a heart next to every message. And if I can get access to a document or a brainstorm and sit in it anonymously, watching people collaborate—I kid you not when I say for me that is better than sex.
And you can guess what my therapist said—try to imagine your own work unfolding like that. But just thinking about my work sets my pulse racing, as the notifications come in and drown me. No, I think for me work will always be like that, the terror up close and the intense peace of seeing it all happen from far away. I think if I had a dream job, it would be to just watch everyone work, and every so often send them messages of encouragement, to let them know they were all seen and loved, by someone who had no other job but to wish them well. But I don’t think anyone would pay me to do that. Anyways, I’m really excited to be here and get going with this project, for as long as they keep me around…!
The sky is gray. Rain spatters down on the East Coast. Scraps of yellow leaves on the trees. The streets are empty, the windows dark, emptied or closed in on themselves. Everyone settles and sinks in their chairs, blended so gradually into the early dark that no bedrooms or offices or kitchens have been lit.
Brad, in Arizona, sits in the sun. Light coats the tiles concealed by the starship Enterprise, and behind him a greyhound sleeps on the couch, paws over its eyes. Brad takes a drink from a steel water bottle beside his desk.
On the lone client camera everything grows more distinct except the sailboat, its edges blurred with glowing brushstrokes as sky and sea merge and the boat now seems to float in the darkness of space.