“Planned obsolescence piece of shit!” I yelled, even though there was no one there to hear me. I thought that was pretty clever, so I got a Post-it note and wrote:
This is a planned obsolescence piece of shit.
Khadijah, please order new one from Staples!
I double-checked the spelling of obsolescence on my iPhone so I wouldn’t embarrass myself.
I wasn’t an alcoholic. Alcoholics fucked up their lives, their jobs, their relationships. I performed drinking like any other activity I was a professional at. Sometimes you needed to know when to walk away, but most times you needed to know when to push through to get to the other side.
Tonight, here in the country, I was on my third mason jar.
There would come a time when I would be able to go on sabbatical from alcohol—it just never seemed like the right time to try. First I’d had to survive 2016, then New Year’s Eve (who wanted a sober NYE?), then the inauguration. Then I thought, Let’s be realistic, there’s no way I can quit until Richual is acquired and I know I have a financial cushion, so I held out for that future, a moving target.
I’d done my Google research. I knew that if I wanted to modify my drinking habit, I needed to make sobriety easier to accomplish, and drinking harder. I should not have kept wine in the apartment (I bought it by the case). I should have declined offers to “join in on a bottle” over lunch meetings, but it was too easy to say yes, to perform the role of the fun cofounder, whenever Devin’s food issues were most excruciatingly apparent. Could I just get a hot water with lemon? How is the asparagus prepared?
Access to drinking was my problem; not drinking. When I finished this bottle, there was another bottle to open, right in the door of the fridge, and if I knew the wifi password, I wouldn’t be able to resist adding the Richual app back on my phone, thumbing down to refresh, refresh, refresh.
“Access,” I said out loud in the bright kitchen. “Excess. Access excess access excess.” I hardly had access to anything at the moment, but it was usually everything—newspapers, magazines, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Street View images of the little white house I lived in as a child, the local weather forecast for Wausau, my high school crush’s LinkedIn profile, Harvard Business Review articles on leadership qualities, a YouTube clip of Amy Poehler as the cool mom in Mean Girls, a trove of Beyoncé gifs. There were few barriers to accessing the tremendous amount of material I could entertain myself with while I avoided facing my life.
Maybe that was the problem. What if there were a better way to control access to Richual itself, to cut down on all the drama, and provide a better user experience? What if all of our assumptions were wrong? Rather than scale as fast as possible, what if we limited our users? Wouldn’t people be willing to pay for a more heavily moderated internet? Wasn’t that what sucked most about the internet—the lack of any accountability or oversight?
If millennials were willing to pay for Blue Apron, for campsites with wifi and prebuilt tents, for wine-of-the-month clubs that catered to whether they preferred the taste of bitter herbs to blackberries, wouldn’t they pay for a social media platform where they could share all the things they couldn’t say on Facebook because that was where their parents were?
We didn’t need premium video content to turn our current users into paid subscribers. We needed a whole new model.
I found a piece of paper and started scribbling:
More users = better (NOT NECESSARILY)
Subscriptions are free = advertising pays vs. paid subscriptions
People value what they pay for
Self-care is worth paying for . . . We are self-care nation . . . something about putting on your oxygen mask before helping others . . . We are the oxygen in the oxygen mask . . . Do you want free oxygen or do you want . . . Devin could come up with the tagline. She could contribute something.
I had to reach her. We could announce our pivot at the Foundress Summit, where Devin was moderating the keynote! I was hardly ever in such a party hat/balloon emoji mood. I uncorked a new bottle and refilled my jar. A toast to myself. Then I picked up my phone, only to be cruelly assaulted by the home screen: “No service.”
If I were a wifi password, I thought, where would I be?
Evan wouldn’t want to live in a world without high-speed internet access. To find the password, I only needed to figure out which room was his.
Past the master at the top of the stairs, there were a few more bedrooms along a narrow hallway, plus another door at the end that led to an annexed wing (or so Devin told me), where the boys’ nannies had stayed when they were little.
The first door on the left led to a guest room, with two four-poster twin beds from the last century, where Devin had slept, leaving an unmade bed behind her for someone else to clean up. I tried the room next to it, which had bunk beds and a wooden chest painted to look like a parrot cage.
As soon as I opened the door across the hall, I knew this was Evan’s room. The bedding was striped dark gray, more modern than the lace and florals in the other bedrooms. The bedside lamp had built-in USB chargers. Above the headboard, there was a framed black-and-white photograph of a woman’s legs dangling off a fire escape. A desk against the windows had a keyboard but no monitor, a Moleskine notebook, a wireless Bose speaker, and a coffee mug of pens. I started rifling through the desk drawers to see if I could find anything that looked like a password. Paper clips, rubber bands, a cell phone charger that plugged into a car’s cigarette lighter, a movie ticket stub so old I couldn’t even read the name of the movie, just a bunch of random useless garbage. But he obviously spent time here on a regular basis, or else why go to the effort to decorate this room?
When I opened the Moleskine notebook, a single brass key slid out of a pocket attached to the inside cover. Holy shit! I’d almost forgotten my bird. She’d been trapped in that room for hours. What if the bird was thirsty? I ran downstairs, my steps making a racket in the empty house, and filled a little teacup with water.
Already, I was mentally rehearsing the story of how I came up with the idea to transform my company’s revenue model, on the same night I rescued a trapped animal that represented the flickering hope of Americans who wondered if we would ever escape this darkness. That was the night I realized everything was going to be okay. It would make a great anecdote for a podcast interview. Gently moving the bird trap out of the way with a foot so I wouldn’t accidentally activate the trigger, I closed my eyes and fit the key into the lock. With a satisfying click, I was in.
All I could hear was the squeak of my own feet on the floorboards. There was no sound of wings. I squinted in the near-dark until I found a lamp switch.
The ceiling was so low, this must have been former servants’ quarters. It was now a junk room, barely big enough to hold a black futon covered in piles of plastic packages and cardboard boxes and sheets folded in sloppy stacks and rubber-banded envelopes of photographs. “Here, honey,” I said, whistling. Assuming the bird was still scared, hiding, I started to lift and move the boxes and piles and what I found myself holding were cords of rope, a black silk sleep mask that said “Fuck” on one side and “Sleep” on the other, a copy of The 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferriss, and a few plastic bags of wigs. There was a “MISOGYNY KILLS” black tank top that I’d seen Evan play Frisbee in once. There were a few vibrators, still in their packaging, that I recognized from the pile of products we were sent to review at Richual. Of course Evan wouldn’t spend his own money furnishing his sex dungeon. He’d practice pleasuring women with whatever gadgets were marketed for women to pleasure themselves with.