Design-Options, the computer company that recruited me out of college, had an interesting hiring philosophy—bring in English majors and train them in computer programming. “It’s easier to teach English majors programming than to teach computer majors how to communicate” was how Mr. Desmond, our beloved boss and patriarch, put it.
One of Mr. Desmond’s other practices was to pay above and beyond the competition so that none of his employees ever left. We were loyal and grateful, and every year he took us to Le Cirque in New York City during the holiday season, where he would hand out fat bonus checks. During employee reviews, he would discuss art and opera, never clients or computers, and never once would he even mention anything about your performance other than to praise it. He and his executive team were old-fashioned gentlemen. It was almost like having lunch with your grandfather, if your grandfather was old and rich and lived in Boston. I have such fond memories of the man and the job.
Once my training was complete, I was sent off to Bankers Trust in New Jersey. At Bankers Trust, we were in charge of keeping the thirty-year-old finance programs running. We programmed in COBOL, one of the original computer languages, so old that our manuals dated from the 1960s. But the bank’s servers still ran on it, and so they kept a staff of consultants to maintain it. The only actual bank employee on our team was the supervisor, a woman named Pat, who was unmarried and had a lot of cats. There were almost no married or working moms in our department, only young, single female programmers like me (there were three of us), Pat, and loads of men—married, old, young, single, the whole gamut.
I liked my job. The computer programmers I worked with were an eclectic bunch, from forty-year-old dads, who shared their kids’ gymnastics pictures and regaled me with stories about tournament trips to Russia, to young Jersey guys, who wore gold chains and went out to the clubs five nights a week. I have pictures from this time of my life: the same group gathered for “Crazy Hat Day,” “Crazy Sunglasses Day,” and “Crazy Hawaiian Shirt Day.”
Then Mr. Mercury joined our group (not his name, his name was Hermes—get it?—names have not been changed to shame the guilty, LOL). Another consultant, just like us, he had an attitude and a reputation for being brilliant but difficult, and from the moment he joined our team, he and I butted heads. He didn’t like the casual camaraderie in the office. He spent hours on the phone on personal calls and then complained that none of us worked hard enough, especially me, since everyone knew I was writing a novel when my computer work was done for the day. (To be fair, most of us did something else—maintenance programming work was easy and rarely needed, and at any given time, Solitaire was open on almost all our computer screens.)
Pat, to her credit, asked me to stick it out. Once we put this project to bed, I would never have to work with Hermes again. But I made no pretense of my loathing for him and took to pointing out every mistake in his code, a game of gotcha that he played as well. I made sure to document every flaw in his design, and he made sure to tattle every time I was on the phone making plans with friends. I thought I could stomach it, and I gave as good as I got, but after a while, his daily complaints about my job performance—when I had had a stellar record until he arrived—got to me. Mr. Desmond learned I was having issues and begged me to stay as well, at least until the next bonus season, which was coming up in April.
But I had never encountered such loathing before—and believe me, Hermes hated me: because I had graduated from a better college, because I was younger, because I was smarter, and because I was a girl. His machismo could not understand how I could write better code than he and still find time to write my book, play Solitaire, and have a personal life.
It was a toxic environment, and the memory of the harassment I suffered still makes my breath catch a little and turns my stomach. I quit my job (giving up my April bonus) and found another small consulting firm to work for.
I was hired as a tester, which was a bit of a step down from a programmer. (The new company used software I was unfamiliar with.) As a tester, I worked with one of the database programmers, whom I’ll call Ron (he looked like Will Ferrell’s Ron Burgundy character). He was a white guy in his thirties, married, with babies, who lived in Jersey, and I was twenty-five and Asian and lived in Manhattan.
We had absolutely nothing in common but the work we did together. But we were friends. I found him hilarious, and he found me the same. There was no sexual tension between us at all. I can say this with utter conviction—our relationship was the very definition of platonic. We were good coworkers, and we cracked each other up. DAILY. Ron treated everyone the same, male or female, with his signature trash-talking, needling, and mocking.
Then, one day, it stopped. I popped by Ron’s cubicle and started teasing him, as I did every day, expecting him to needle me back, before asking him to reset the database. Instead of playing along, he said, very politely, and in a somewhat small voice, “Yes, I will restart the database.”
HIS MACHISMO COULD NOT UNDERSTAND HOW I COULD WRITE BETTER CODE THAN HE AND STILL FIND TIME TO WRITE MY BOOK, PLAY SOLITAIRE, AND HAVE A PERSONAL LIFE.
I was like, “Dude, what is up with you?” But he wouldn’t even look me in the eye.
I asked around, wondering if anyone knew what was up with Ron. I was so confused. Where had my friend gone?
Finally, I learned that someone had “spoken to him about his behavior.” Apparently, some of my colleagues were uncomfortable with the nature of our friendship. One of the supervisors had told Ron that he had to stop treating me in such a casual manner, that it was inappropriate, that I might find it harassment.
WHUT?
I was so shocked. No one even asked me what I thought. I couldn’t believe our joking around had gotten him in trouble. To this day, I am frustrated and sad that the corporate environment we were in did not know what to make of a friendship between two coworkers of the opposite sex.
A few years later, I left computer programming behind for good when I sold my first novel to Simon and Schuster. I’m happy to write that I’ve not run into any barriers in the publishing industry because of my gender. Though it has now been two decades since I switched to writing full time, I still receive emails from my former coworkers in the computer trenches. Frank from Jersey, with the gymnastics kids, sent me the sweetest congratulatory email when my first book was published. Jaime, who planned his wedding on his downtime (while I wrote my novel), did the same. Chris, a fellow recruit from Design-Options, sent the nicest note about how proud he was upon seeing my name on the bestseller list.
I never heard from Ron. He’d quit the firm a few months before I did. I never knew what happened to him, nor did I ever get a chance to talk to him about what had happened, because we never even had another conversation after he’d been dressed down. And that still makes me sad. To this day, I’m sorry we couldn’t be friends at work because I was a girl.