“Uh,OK?”
“If Iaccidentallydeleted the job listing…” She raises her eyebrows.
I catch her meaning. “That would be a tragic, but honest, mistake.”
“So tragic,” she agrees.
I shake my head sadly. “I’ve always said it’s such a shame you’re not more tech-savvy, working at a place like this.”
She beams.
“Yes, well, it has its upsides. This way I won’t need to find a new lunch buddy.”
Our heist comes together quickly after that. Carrie makes the internal transfer on the system, moving me from my old role to my new one, “accidentally” deletes the job listing from the website, and then rescues my employee profile from the digital abyss. As quickly as I was fired, I’m hired again, my inbox blinking back to life. Like my own personal Cinderella moment, I’ve been turned from a peasant into a princess. I now have until midnight to convince the head of strategy to let me keep thejob.
“I have no idea if this will work,” she cautions. “They might be interviewing someone else for it right now. And that will be your own fault! This is why Ialwayscheck my calendar first thing.”
“Again, very sorry about that. If I had known I was getting laid off this morning, I would have screened my mother’s call.”
“Good. Now get out. I have ten more of these meetings todo.”
Two
Taskio is spread across five floors in one of the swishy new World Trade buildings, with views stretching out over Manhattan’s Financial District and the Hudson River beyond.
All five floors are carbon copies of one another: enormous, open-plan squares with hundreds of workstations, the walls adorned with meaningless phrases likefollow your curiousandbreak the moldspelled out in neon lights.
The office has been designed, at great expense, to inspire creativity and productivity. We even have several fun little breakout spaces where you can go to play guitar, or secretlycry.
This place resembles a fancy high school: there’s a cafeteria, an auditorium for assemblies, and desks for the thousands of employees who work here. There are cliques, and popular kids, and the department heads all feel like teachers—they’re constantly giving you grades.
As a service, Taskio is brilliant in its dumbness; it’s a digital version of the cork board you probably had in your family kitchen growing up. Using Taskio, you can pin up all your little digital cue cards and sort them into lists, dragging them around between columns that you might label as “to do” and “done,” for example.
As the years have gone by, the software has become ever more powerful and complicated, but the basic principles are the same. You use Taskio to stay organized and productive and on top of yourtasks,whatever they maybe.
The reason Taskio has achieved global popularity isn’t because it makes you more productive—in fact, exactly the opposite is true. Meticulously managing your projects using our software is like planning to make a plan; mostly, you could get the task done in the same amount of time it takes you to note down that you intend to do that task.
But by creating elaborate boards for your projects, and assigning deadlines, and tracking timelines, all that work you’re doing that would otherwise be invisible—and therefore meaningless—is suddenly out in the open for everyone to see. Taskio doesn’t help youbeproductive. It helps youfeelproductive. That’s why we make the big bucks.
Thanks to the cookie-cutter layout of the building—and helpful overhead signs pointing you to the different departments, like a techy grocery store—it’s not hard to find Data Strategy. I don’t know anyone on this team, but after a hasty Google of her name, I can at least remember the department head: an extremely impressive and slightly terrifying woman called Naomi, who gives off real girlboss energy whenever she speaks at a town hall.
Even with fewer workstations on this floor than on my own, the place is deserted. There’s only one guy here, ensconced behind a truly enormous pair of monitors. He’s wearing headphones, and so it’s not until I’m nearly right in front of him that he clocks my presence. When he does, he seems surprised, but also not, as if a total stranger approaching him out of nowhere is the sort of thing that happens to him all the time.
He pulls off his headphones as I come to a halt at the edge of his desk. I wonder, belatedly, if I should have taken the time to freshen up before I got here.
My getup today is what my roommate Sam calls“Hot Steve Jobs,” which is to say a black roll neck paired with a denim maxi skirt.
I had tossed my hair into an extremely sweaty ponytail sometime after getting to Carrie’s office. I itch now to take it back down, but if I did it would no longer be straight, but kinked from the haphazard way I tied itup.
For his part, he looks like every other New York normie who inhabits this city, but slightly better, like a Hollywood A-lister who’s been dressed down to play the role of AverageGuy.
He’s in a brown knit hoodie, a beat-up pair of Levi’s, and tennis shoes. He’s also wearing a baseball cap, which he seems alittleold for, and his brown hair wings out from underneath it around his neck and ears. Not a look I admire, personally, but to each theirown.
His desk, I notice, is cluttered with all kinds of crap: empty coffee mugs, stacks of paper, another hat. And…a mini monster trucktoy?
“Heyyy,” I say, dragging the word out while I try and marshal my wits back into order. “I’m looking for Naomi?”
“Evans?”
