“Hopefully, this is just the beginning of much bigger things to come. For both of us.” I led her to the front door, where we hugged our goodbyes. “I’ll see you on Thursday night, right?”
“I wouldn’t miss it.”
After Priya left, I returned to my room and collapsed into bed, hoping to get a little bit of rest before the lead-up to the big event. Every time I closed my eyes, though, lines of code danced behind my lids. I picked up my phone, eager for some mindless distraction to wind down and de-stress.
Though I’m not quite sure why I thought I’d find respite in the blathering maelstrom that is Twitter. Particularly when I checked out the “Trends for You” section and decided to scroll through the #inPerson hashtag.
Most of it was positive. People had received their invitations and were excited for the big event. Others were speculating on venues and wondering who else was invited. Still others lamented their lack of an invitation and offered money to anyone willing to sell theirs. (Which was against our rules, and given our identification requirements, wouldn’t have worked, anyway.)
But then I came across a troubling tweet, posted by a user who went by the handle BlitzkriegBoss:
Why r u all creaming ur pants over this shitty app? Everyone knows the bitch in charge stole #inPerson from an ex-coworker.
I had to read the sentence a couple of times to understand it. Was this person really accusing me of stealing inPerson?
Against my better judgment, I clicked on BlitzkriegBoss’s profile and discovered a litany of tweets aimed at discrediting me. He said I was a thief, and a liar, and a “thirsthound,” whatever that meant. There was even a link to a Reddit thread, in which BlitzkriegBoss posted a lengthy diatribe explaining his stance in greater detail.
I used to work with this bitch at Hatch before she got fired for being incompetent. She wasn’t even a coder—she worked the help desk, and she sucked at it. You wanna know the reason she got fired? Because she installed keyloggers on everyone’s laptop, including mine. She stole the code for inPerson from a qualified Hatchling, and now she’s trying to make a buck off it. I hope she’s exposed for the scam artist she is!
It was hard to read the words through the rage tears forming in my eyes. Clearly, BlitzkriegBoss was none other than Josh Brewster, the founder of that totally original fantasy football app, Blitz. I knew he was a liar and a scumbag, but if I told anyone the truth about why I’d really installed a keylogger on his machine, who would believe me? Obviously, I had a vested interest in protecting my reputation. And after the way things went down in my last days at Hatch, there’s no way anyone there would have my back.
Especially Greg, aka FreakinFizz69, who had this charming anecdote to add to the thread:
Don’t forget she was hungry for the d. My partner banged her but dumped her ass when she went psycho. Heard she hacked into his computer to steal his code.
Oh, God. This just kept getting worse. The further I scrolled, the more horrid the accusations became, all of them generally boiling down to the same core message: girls are whores who can’t code for shit. Most of the posts didn’t even seem like they came from Hatchlings. They were simply random men who sniffed out a trollfest and jumped at the chance to pile on.
The internet is truly a terrible place.
Normally, I’d have tried to brush off these accusations. They were baseless and juvenile. Besides, it’s not like people hadn’t tried to slam me on the internet before.
For some reason, though, this felt different. This felt intensely personal. Because despite it being a bunch of faceless semi-anonymous commenters typing from behind the safety of a Reddit thread, they had a goal in mind: to smear me so badly that investors would run screaming away from inPerson. They didn’t want my start-up to get funded. They wanted to bring my career to a standstill before it even got going.
Well, fuck them.
I clicked the comment icon to open the message box to post my own reply. This slander couldn’t live out there on the internet, uncontested. I had to at least try to defend myself.
But as my thumbs hovered over the virtual keyboard, I struggled to find the right words. What could I possibly say to convince people I wasn’t a liar and a thief? And why would anyone believe me over any of these other guys? I’d already had one big start-up deal fall through because my ownership of the code had been called into question. There’s no way another investor would want to take a chance on me when I was surrounded by all of these rumors.
It was pointless.
This was the end of it: my career, my reputation, my future in tech.
At least, that’s what I thought until I closed the message box, and found a new comment posted by Piquete92:
This thread is filled with hateful garbage written by sad, jealous men. Melanie Strickland is a talented and intelligent woman, fully capable of developing her own kick-ass app. I’ve seen her in action, and trust me, she didn’t need to be stealing anybody’s code—especially not any of the mediocre coders pervading Hatch’s noxious, bro-filled hallways. She’s a good person, deep down, and she deserves all the success I hope inPerson brings her.
(By the way, Greg, I didn’t “dump her when she went psycho,” as you so eloquently stated. Things between us just didn’t work out, and what happened is nobody’s business—certainly not yours, and definitely not the internet’s.)
Alex.
My heart swelled. He had jumped to my defense, publicly shaming his partner and bashing Hatch in the process. Words like this could put his job at risk. Why would he do that for me, when he didn’t even bother to reply to my last text?
I pulled up our weeks-old message thread and typed: Thank you for defending me. But before I hit Send, I reread it. It looked so impersonal. Black letters on a white background, a bunch of lifeless pixels strung together. How could five disembodied words express everything I felt in that moment?
They couldn’t.
With a stroke of my thumb, I deleted the sentence. Then I dropped my phone in my purse, slipped on my shoes, and ran for the door.
It was time to take this conversation off the internet and into real life.
30
If you want to smooth things over with your ex, working yourself into a frenzy before showing up at his apartment unannounced is generally not the best approach to take. But in my case, I didn’t see another option. There was no way to properly convey my thoughts in a text message, and it’s not like he was responsive to those, anyway. Plus, if I waited until I was less emotional, odds were I’d chicken out completely.
No. It was best to go now, while I was still flustered and verklempt.
On the A train into the city, I tried to think of the right thing to say. Some elegant way of expressing my gratitude and regret for everything he’d said, everything I’d done. “Thanks” and “sorry” just didn’t seem to cut it. Not when what I really wanted to do was convince him to give me another chance. To give us another chance.