Janitors are on their feet all day. Engineers are at their computers all day. What does Silicon Valley do to the body? Nobody knows better than a massage therapist.
We spoke to someone who was paid to pummel and pry open the knotted muscles of tech’s more privileged workers. Massage gave her an unusual window into the dynamics of the company where she worked, and those of the industry as a whole. She saw some people at their most vulnerable, others at their most insufferable. We talked about what tension feels like, and the various tensions of her own job. We talked about tech’s unspoken hierarchies, and whether stress makes you a better worker.
I trained in massage in my mid-forties. Soon after I graduated, I was recruited over LinkedIn by a wellness startup that had a contract to provide services to a large tech company. That company was our only client.
The model was data-driven wellness. Our startup was trying to provide meaningful metrics to the company to demonstrate that we were saving them money by preventing illness through offering massage, chiropractic, acupuncture, training, exercise, yoga—that sort of thing. Employees could come to us and pay only a dollar to get a service.
My husband is a San Francisco native. Nobody in our family is in the tech industry. But we lived in Noe Valley. So I saw the Google bus phenomenon when it was just starting to happen. And I had read about Twitter getting a tax break from our city while I was pressured to raise inordinate amounts of money for my children’s public school education.1 So let’s just say I had mixed feelings.
But when I was hired, I decided to set all that aside and try to take people as they were. When you’re massaging somebody, you really don’t care if they’re rich or poor or anything like that. You just deal with the body in front of you.
People worked long hours. They had postural problems, the sort you get from sitting at a desk all day. Many of them did not exercise or strengthen their body, so the wear and tear of being on a computer for ten to twelve hours straight was even worse because they had muscle weakness. We also had people who would go home and game all night long and get three hours of sleep and come back to work and then wonder why they hurt all the time.
Mostly, though, people were just stressed out. So they had the muscle tension that comes with that.
Somebody might come in and say, “Oh, my shoulders feel a bit tight.” And then as you start to work on their shoulders, it feels completely solid. Like their back is a single slab of marble. You cannot differentiate the different muscles from each other or even from the bones of the spine. Everything is tense in equal measure and everything feels the same.
Of course, it’s incredibly tiring to apply pressure to a body like that. It’s not so different from trying to soften up old meat. So you end up worrying about your hands. I have arthritis developing in a couple of my joints.
Only direct employees of the company could use the service. I voiced a desire many times to work on the kitchen staff, who were contract workers like us. There was a young woman in the cafeteria who had lymphedema. It was congenital; she’d had it since she was a child. Her legs were huge. And I wanted to work on her because she had to stand or lean on a stool all day. Having a little bit of massage would have helped her tremendously. But she wasn’t allowed.
It was a mix. There were some difficult young men who came in and wanted to express their dominance. They were almost exclusively engineers. They would ask me a lot of questions about how I was trained and what I knew about the body. Quizzing me on my job while receiving a massage.
I usually tried to rebalance things by answering their questions about my background and my training matter-of-factly, and then just stop talking. So they would realize that quizzing me was not the point of the massage. Sometimes I would just lean on the sore parts of their body. That’s one fail-safe trick to get someone out of their head and back into the present.
One guy in particular stood out to me because he always insisted on taking off his shirt to get a massage. He was very hairy, and he seemed unaware that back hair is difficult to massage. He had just gone to his first Burning Man right around the time he joined the company, and he had just discovered CrossFit. He liked to talk about both. I remember him to this day. You never forget a hairy back.
There were a lot of female administrative staff. They tended to be physically fit, trim, attractive younger women.
Many of them seemed stressed and sad. It sent my antennae up. I felt protective. The vibe was that they always had to have a smile on their face. They had to joke along with the guys. They had to be smart and funny. They had to be entertaining. I worried about them.
All of the executives at the company had their own administrative assistants. I remember one woman in particular. She was gorgeous. She was in her twenties, twenty-eight at the most. She wasn’t the assistant to the CEO, but to someone right below him. One day, she came in incredibly stressed. She had scheduled a thirty-minute massage for herself. She came in holding her phone, which was how her executive communicated with her. And when she lay down on the table, she wouldn’t let go of it.
I don’t just mean the phone was on the massage table with her. Plenty of other people did that, which was fine with me. I mean she was literally holding it during her session.
I tried to take it out of her hand and we nearly had a fight. When I reached for it, she yanked it back. I wanted to be maternal and caring, but also assertive. Like, you’re not gonna get anything out of the massage if you’re on the phone. There was a back-and-forth there for a second, a real tug-of-war. Finally, I thought: The horse is out of the barn. I guess she needs this phone. So I let go.
Feeling her body, I could tell that she was near some kind of break. Just physically and emotionally drained.
A few minutes later, something happened on her phone and she got up and ran out.
People almost never talked about work. I think they had all been told to be careful with the massage therapists for fear of spilling trade secrets. We were also all made to sign an NDA before working there. One of the conditions was that we couldn’t even reveal the name of the company. I mean, good Lord. My husband is a police detective. He has a top-secret clearance from the federal government, and he has more freedom to talk about where he worked and what he did than I did at that company at the very same time. He works on some sensitive stuff, like literal life-and-death stuff. The whole thing was kind of ridiculous.
One time, there was a woman who came to see me for a massage who was extremely upset. I think she worked in HR. She just lay on the table and cried and cried. But she wouldn’t talk about whatever it was. The general rule in massage is that when somebody is crying and they don’t want to talk about it, you just let them. So I didn’t press it.
Then there was the time that I saw one of my regulars in our area. So I came over with my breakfast tray and said hello. He was on his laptop working, and his screen was facing where I was standing. When he saw me, he quickly turned his laptop away and slammed the screen down. And I thought, Honey, nothing on that screen would mean a thing to me. I mean, I wouldn’t be able to understand what I was looking at, let alone interpret any of the code.
We were technically allowed to go anywhere. I had the badge to access all the different floors. But in practice, there was an unspoken, self-policed hierarchy of who was allowed to go where.
There was a really incredible coffee bar on one of the floors. The executive chef at the company was the person who brought in our wellness startup. I think he had a personal connection to one of the founders. For him, his power base in the company lay in the food. So he told us to go to the coffee bar anytime we wanted.
I went there a couple of times, but I never felt comfortable. No matter how many times they told us we could and should go anywhere, I felt like if I ever ventured beyond our little corner of the company, people would just start looking at me like, Who are you and why are you here? You obviously don’t fit. I remember feeling like there were eyes in my back, eyes boring a hole in my back. If I went too deep into a space, if I went over some invisible line, I was like, I’d better turn around and go.
Yup. One of the perks of the job was that we got two free meals there per day.
The galley where you would pick up your food was in the center of the cafeteria. In a U shape around that galley was the seating area. All of the contract workers tended to gather at one of the top ends of the U. Not an ideal place to sit, but that’s where we all felt safe. We could just kind of relax a little bit—the massage therapists, the kitchen staffers, the people who worked at the coffee bar and the juice bar. Not the janitorial staff, though, because they never got to sit down.
The massage therapists were sort of this in-between group in the office because we interfaced with a lot of engineers. They were mostly friendly to us. They treated us better than the kitchen staff, who definitely bore the brunt of the snobbish behavior. But they didn’t want us to sit with them. It felt like high school.
Sometimes an engineer would drift too far into our part of the cafeteria and suddenly realize where he was and immediately pick up his tray and run back toward the other engineers.
The most uncomfortable manifestation of these unwritten rules was what happened with my daughter.
One day, for some reason, I can’t remember why, my daughter was at work with me. She was a fifth grader at the time and she had some interest in tech and computers and had learned to code over the summer. So I wanted to introduce her to a lovely young engineer, a woman, who I had gotten to know. That woman was brilliant. She had been homeschooled, but I think she was a better coder than all the guys who had gone to the fancy Ivy League schools.
My daughter and I entered the engineering area. It was a big, open floor. There were maybe a hundred engineers at work. And I just remember feeling like I was walking through a fog of “No, get away.” I can’t totally explain it. There’s nothing specific I can point to. I just felt unwelcome. I felt people’s eyes on me. People looking at me like, Who is she and why is she here? And I had a child with me, which I’m sure was unusual.
Anyway, we made it to the desk of this young woman and her male coworker. They were hard at work at their standing desks. They were both very nice, although he seemed a bit uncomfortable. It was awkward. It felt like I had done something wrong. It made me realize that people can be nice, but that doesn’t mean they necessarily want you in their space.
No. But I felt so mortified for her. I felt ashamed. I’d clearly made some sort of mistake, some kind of social faux pas.
Later, I got angry. I didn’t want my daughter to be exposed to any of that. That’s fine for me, not for my kids. I didn’t want my child to be touched by this hierarchical crap.
She does not.
At some point, I began to realize that the company wasn’t doing so well. I started to pick up on it with one of my favorites. He always treated me like a regular person. Not putting me on a pedestal, not treating me like a servant—he just took me as I was. And that was actually sort of an exception.
He was a little older than the average engineer, mid to late thirties. Just the sweetest teddy bear of a guy. The company had purchased a food delivery app, and it required a lot of integration, or something. They assigned him to the project, and it was a bumpy ride. Things didn’t seem to be pulling together. He was working insane hours. His body was a wreck. The stress was killing him. His back felt like Sheetrock.
As I said before, I’m sure they were told not to discuss business, because almost nobody did. And I didn’t want to know. I would never want to carry trade secrets around in my head. I had too much to do. But I knew that whatever was happening, it wasn’t good.
Things were failing left and right. This was around the time that people started to talk about the company going public. Then it just stopped. The fizzling of the IPO created a sense of upheaval. People started worrying about the potential for layoffs. The stress level definitely picked up. It drove a lot of traffic to our wellness center.
That’s also when our wellness startup started to get mixed signals about its relationship with the tech company.
After the failed IPO, the tech company brought in someone new to run HR. And that person terminated the contract with the wellness startup.
The startup’s founders talked to me a lot. They said they routinely got feedback that we were so good at our jobs that the engineers were coming back to work too relaxed. So maybe that played a role in the demise of the program. Maybe stress and tension really do make you a better worker.