* * *
From: Joshua Brewster
To: Melanie Strickland
Subject: re: Minor Delay
Fucking figures.
* * *
Why should I continue to kill myself working hard for these ungrateful start-up founders? Even when I did everything right, Bob would defend them and scold me. I was much better off half-assing it around the office, prioritizing JerkAlert and making it the best it could possibly be. That’s the only way I’d ever found a start-up of my own.
For the next couple of hours, I focused on optimizing my code, reconfiguring my server settings, and restructuring my database. It was the most I could do without upgrading my web hosting to a more expensive plan—which was definitely something I could not afford to do right now (or anytime in the foreseeable future). But it was more than sufficient, because as soon as I uploaded my changes, response times and page loads improved almost instantly.
Take that, Gene Steinbach and Michael McCarthy.
Feeling confident and accomplished, I moved on to the mind-numbing task of cleaning up Josh’s infected laptop. While the scanner searched for contaminated files, I read the BuzzFeed article for approximately the millionth time. And because I apparently enjoy making myself miserable, I went back to the comments section. Part of me had hoped to find people saying how speedy the site suddenly seemed, and berating Gene and Michael for their asinine remarks.
Of course, that wasn’t happening. Instead, I found this gem:
Frankie Fanning—New York, NY
I’d say some frigid bitch made this website, but we all know girls can’t code for shit.
My vision went blurry around the edges and my breath became ragged puffs of air.
We all know girls can’t code for shit.
It’s the kind of thing I always suspected men were thinking when they looked at me. Like when the guys at tech meetups told me I didn’t look like a developer, or spent their time hitting on me instead of inquiring about my credentials. I’d even been aware of it back in college, when my classmates would ignore my suggestions during group work, and my professors would tell sexist jokes like I wasn’t in the lecture hall.
To see it here, typed out in black-and-white, confirmed my worst fears: in this industry, I’d always be viewed as inferior, and it had nothing to do with my actual skill, and everything to do with my gender.
What I wanted right now, more than anything else in the world, was to tell everyone out there that a girl was responsible for creating this site. A girl had designed it, a girl had coded it, a girl was keeping it going through a period of tremendous growth.
And a girl was going to get rich off it.
My fingers flew to the keyboard, ready to type up a response to this asshole, Frankie Fanning. He was going to know exactly who he was dealing with: a woman who was no longer interested in taking anyone’s shit. But as I sat there, stringing angry words together in a text box, I quickly realized that outing myself in the comments section of a BuzzFeed article was a terrible idea. Nothing good ever came from reacting in a moment of rage, and it certainly wouldn’t reflect well on me as a woman, who already suffered the stigma of being “too emotional.”
I needed to stay calm, to think this through, to devise a deliberate and effective plan for revealing my identity to the public. Closing my web browser and ignoring the comments section was a good first step.
The second step: consult Whitney. With her PR expertise, she’d know exactly what to do.
15
“Don’t do it.”
Whit’s feelings about my desire to go public were unambiguous.
This was not the response I had hoped for. I’d envisioned squeals of delight, enthusiastic high fives, publicity plans plotted out on cocktail napkins. Instead, Whitney shook her head with disdain, as if I should’ve already known it was a stupid idea.
“Anonymity is part of the allure,” she said. “Nobody knows who’s posting what, or where JerkAlert even came from. Keeping your identity a secret will help generate buzz.”
“Hasn’t enough buzz already been generated?” Dani chimed in.
“This is nothing.” Whit waved her hand dismissively and brought her wineglass to her lips. “Investors aren’t gonna come running with cash in hand over one measly BuzzFeed article.”
“It doesn’t feel like nothing,” I said. “Do you know how many unique visitors JerkAlert had yesterday? Three thousand, six hundred and fifteen.”
“Is that more than you usually have?”
“Yeah. Like fifty times more.”
“Wow,” Lia said. “Do you know how that #JerkAlert hashtag got started?”
The smirk on Whit’s red lips was all the answer we needed.
“It was you?”
“Hashtags are one of the best ways to launch an organic marketing campaign.”
“But how did you get it to trend like that?”
“It wasn’t hard. I picked some of the more heinous JerkAlert profiles and tagged a few influencers who I know are single and dating. They tagged their friends, who tagged their friends and so on, until it exploded.” She sipped her wine. “I also hooked into #DickInTheDark.”
“What?” That damn hashtag was just beginning to fade from the collective memory. The last thing I wanted was for Whit to resurrect those awful memes and connect them to my burgeoning tech venture.
“Calm down,” she said, “it’s no biggie. I just said things like, ‘Avoid a #DickInTheDark with #JerkAlert.’ It helped to increase visibility. Then I shot a casual email off to Kirra and said she might consider covering it for BuzzFeed. The rest is history.”
Our server dropped by with a tray of sliders ordered off the happy hour menu for five bucks a pop.
“Here you are, ladies,” he said, as he placed the dishes down in front of us. “Three beef, three veggie, and two crispy fish.”
“Oh my God, these look amazing,” Whitney said.
“My personal favorite is the fish.” He crouched down slightly and leaned toward Whitney, as if she was the only person at the table. “But watch out for the jalapeños.”
Never one to turn away from blatant flirtation, she bit back a smile. “Thanks for the warning, but I can handle the heat.”
Dani didn’t even try to contain her laughter at that cheesy line. It didn’t faze Whit or the waiter, though. They held each other’s gazes, steady and smoldering, until the woman at the next table loudly demanded more bread. As the waiter turned away to fetch a new basket, Whit’s eyes stayed glued to his backside.