Jennifer and Rocket (The Princesses of Silicon Valley Book 6) (19 page)

I work as an engineer at a Silicon Valley software startup. Yes, it sounds as geeky as it is; though, after growing up in a house with parents who are both Silicon Valley veterans and getting my bachelors and masters in engineering, it’s business as usual for me. Anyway, one of the perks at my company is a free cafeteria--that looks trendy, like a hip restaurant. Starting my day, I head directly there. Performing my morning ritual I say “hi” to Mario, who mans the breakfast counter, grab a plain Greek yogurt with granola, then fill my water bottle up with herbal iced tea. All the men I know view free food as a godsend, though I don’t want to gain the “
Google 15.
” It’s not that the guys don’t put on the weight; it’s that they don’t seem to care and then again there’s that old double standard, fifteen extra pounds on a guy and they still can get laid.

Getting in early is great since most of the people on my team pull in at around ten or eleven, giving me three to four hours of privacy. My company has this crazy idea that an open environment facilitates communication and team building. This idea had to be dreamed up by some executive with a big office, and a door that closes. The floor I work on is broken up into large areas that house about twenty engineers in an open environment. A wall of conference rooms—rooms with copiers and cold drink dispensers, or offices where the managers sit, separate each section. In truth, an open office is really distracting, since I overhear and see everything that’s going on. Having people look over my shoulder when I work is disconcerting.

By 10:00 a.m., the office is starting to fill up. Passing by Ian on the way back from my morning stretch my leg break, I shiver, and not in a good way. Ian is a mathematician that works on my team. He’s viewed by the other guys as some kind of genius. He’s also about sixty pounds overweight, and is pasty white with lots of thick red hair all over his body. I know this because he always wears a white wife beater and running shorts. Every day. To work. I’m hoping with winter coming, he puts on more clothes since he’s the physical equivalent of too much information. Trying to avoid looking and thinking about Ian causes a smile to cross my face. I flashback to Abs Guy. Now, spending my day looking at Abs Guy wearing a wife beater doesn’t sound half bad. This thought makes me excited and internally I gasp.
Oh, god, stay focused, Juliette.
I remind myself that’s not what successful engineers think about. My mom raised me to be serious, a leader, not some giddy girl who wastes her time daydreaming about scantily clad men. Damn, it’s much more fun thinking about beautiful men.

My mind is jarred back to reality as I walk to my chair when, Buddy, a fellow engineer’s German Shepherd, comes bounding up sticking her nose in my crotch. Shit, can she tell what I’ve been thinking about? Pushing her head out from between my legs, I try not to look too embarrassed. It’s not like I don’t like dogs. I grew up with dogs. I really like them, but Buddy and her crotch sniffing drives me crazy.

Then there’s Tom, who I have labeled Creepy Tom since he’s always staring at me. He’s a big guy with a goatee who must be more than ten years older than me. Plus, he’s married with a couple of kids. My goal is to avoid Creepy Tom. It’s disconcerting to have him in the same work area. Last week while I was getting a bottle of juice out of the drink dispenser, he came up real close behind me…and I think he sniffed my hair. Next place I work, I’m going to make sure they have cube walls that go up to the ceiling. I don’t want to see these guys; I don’t want them looking at me.

Now that the office is filling up, I put earbuds in. My phone is tuned to my favorite Pandora channel; it allows me to focus back on the simulation I’m working on.

I work in an engineering group that uses algorithms to develop analytical tools for making sense of big data. That is all kinds of organizations are saving petabytes of information on what people are doing on the web. Unfortunately, our ability to save information is much more advanced than our ability to figure out what this information means. My company makes products to search through the data and provide our customers with reports that show them meaningful occurrences.

The first step for my group is to develop an algorithm, then we plug these algorithms into programs that run through the data to find trends; the next step is to optimize this process so it doesn’t take forever.

Since I’m new to this group, I get to build simulations in MATLAB and write them in Python. We have our own large data set we use to test against. My job is to see if the new algorithms actually can be used to identify trends in large data sets. After I exercise the new algorithms, I provide Mark, the guy with the dog, my findings. He works with Ian, the hairy guy, to fine tune these algorithms so they work more effectively.

I’m looking forward to when I’m considered knowledgeable enough to get past running simulations for my co-workers and can start using C++ to write code of my own, which actually will be a lot of fun—even though when I told Cassie what I did, she rolled her eyes halfway through the explanation, shook her head and said “What?”—then told me I needed to get laid. She may not be a rocket scientist, but on the sex front, she’s very perceptive.

Taking into consideration Ian and Tom’s outlier personalities, the ten engineers on my development team work well together—we all have a strong mathematical background. Two other engineers on my team are big-time San Francisco baseball fans. In the month I’ve been here, I have learned a lot of baseball statistics. Before joining this group, I didn’t even know what an RBI was. Now I know who leads the team and what their RBI score is. Cassie says that’s the first thing I’ve learned in all my years of schooling that may come in handy one day in landing a guy.

At 11:50 a.m., I get an internal IM from Hita—the only other woman on my team:
Ready for lunch?

Hita and I have been friends since our freshman year of college. We were in the same classes and quickly became study partners. Back in the spring she got me in to interview for this job, lucky for me the position was still open when I decided to leave my boyfriend in London. Hita’s American, but her parents came from India. She’s tall, about five foot ten, with long runner’s legs, thick, shiny hair that goes down to the middle of her back, and she has an easy-going, happy personality with a quirky sense of humor that can get her in trouble.

Our freshman year there was seven of us that decided to go to the Halloween parties at school as princesses. Hita was one of the princesses, Pocahontas. Get it? –Indian. My hair is very dark brown, my skin is pale, and my eyes are brown. I was Snow White. Initially, the seven of us had nothing in common except a desperate need to make the most of campus life, which we did, starting with that Halloween party. Six years later, I’m still tight with this group of women. We jokingly refer to ourselves as “The Princesses” to this day—and at times refer to each other by our princess names.

As Hita and I walk down the hall, she asks, “Hey, how’s it going?”

“Fine, though I’m looking forward to the day I can do more than run other people’s algorithms through MATLAB.”

“Give it some time, it takes a while to get the hang of what we’re doing.”

Changing the subject, I can’t help but tell her, “There is the most beautiful guy at swimming. I saw him again this morning.”

She chuckles, “Juliette, you’ve been back what, a month, and you’ve already eyed your next man.”

“How long do I need to be back before I can start checking out guys?”

She shakes her head. “You’re amazing, I don’t even know what happened in London.” Then she gives me a long look and I can tell she wants details. Since I don’t say a word she jokes, “Hey, if he doesn’t work out, Tom can’t get his eyes off of you.”

Scrunching up my nose I say, “Of all the guys who have to have the hots for me, just my luck, it’s Creepy Tom.”

“It could be worse, it could be Ian.”

“Ewww, could you imagine having to eat dinner with Ian? I think I’d barf if I had to look at all that white hairy skin while I ate.”

“I never realized how much I should have appreciated my high school’s dress code.”

“Someone’s got to get that guy to put some clothes on.”

“Do you think men look at, or care about, what some other dude is wearing?”

We both roll our eyes.

Hita follows up with, “Unfortunately those creepy guys from school all got jobs and some of them are now working here.”

By now we’ve reached the cafeteria. Hita spots Caroline, who works on the client side of engineering using PHP to develop our dashboard—what our customers see when they access the solutions departments like mine create.

After standing in the sushi line to get lunch I head into the company dining room to find my friends. It reminds me of my high school cafeteria; everyone is there. You have your bro-grammers, those ex-jock and fraternity guy code-monkeys who are known for their cocky attitude, being bad at math, and sleeping around a lot, a feat made possible by their six figure salaries. Then you have the artist and psychology majors turned programmer types. They work on people's cognitive interaction with technology, write code, smoke a TON of weed, and make art on weekends. They tend to live in social collectives, and are a big reason communal living is making a resurgence in San Francisco. Both of those archetypes are the ones who go to hackathons, and play video games for hours on end. Probably most annoying is that they get to take advantage of that unfair and dumb double standard that allows them to be both nerdy and cool at the same time, while women are not. 

Harder to pick out from just looking at them are the engineers and the physicists. The engineers are simple guys who like to solve problems and excel in higher math. My mom always jokes that they make terrible boyfriends since they’re devoid of comprehending romance, but make fantastic husbands since they’re practical, handy and helpful. The physicists, on the other hand, usually can’t do anything around the house and also seem to be arrogant pricks. At companies like mine, we also have mathematicians. They tend to be weirdos; think: UniBomber, Hairy Ian, or Creepy Tom. We also have a gaggle of the H-1B visa carrying guys, mostly from India and China. They tend to hang out together, wear ugly polyester shirts and slacks, and have a habit of giggling and nervously ogling when a woman is near. This list doesn’t even include any of the marketing, sales, customer support, or finance people that work here.

As I look over at the table, I see that Hita is already sitting down with Caroline and Kami. Besides their boss, we are the only women in engineering at this company. As I join them, Caroline looks at me appraisingly.

Shaking my head at Hita, I ask, “What did you tell her?”

Caroline laughs, “Nothing. We’re on our favorite topic: hot guys.”

“I thought our favorite topic was sex,” I respond.

“And the difference is...?” Hita says with a smirk.

“Oh, Abs Guy is definitely hot.” I respond.

Hita starts laughing. “Abs Guy, you’ve already named him.”

“What, it’s not like he had his name written across the back of his speedo.”

“Who cares about a name, what did he look like? Besides the six pack,” Caroline pushes.

“He got out of the pool with one big push up, every muscle in his body flexed.” I swoon as I replay the scene in my mind.

“And?” Caroline says.

“And, his body’s so buff. When he reached into the bin to get out a pull buoy the muscles of his stomach rippled.”

Caroline says, “You have no idea what his face looks like, do you?”

“Um…” I say, as I start cracking up, “he has dark hair and a nice dimple.”

Caroline chuckles and shakes her head. “You sound like you need some, bad.”

Rolling my eyes and groaning, I respond, “You have no idea.”

Hita gives me another long questioning look before asking, “Juliette, last I knew you were taking off for London to be with Stephan.” She bobs her eyebrows up and down when she says Stephan. “The next thing I know you’re asking around about jobs here…without Stephan. “

“How do we move from spotting beautiful men to my experience in London? What about your love life? I haven’t heard anything from you since I’ve been back.” I too can give the power look.

Hita sighs. “My love life consists of dodging my mother’s meddling Indian matchmaking, while finding nothing better on my own. The dating scene is totally depressing.” Her tone is mater-of-fact. “I spend way too much of my time working.” She lifts her fork and points it at me. “Furthermore, you’re changing the subject. I’ve been patient. I haven’t interrogated you. It’s been a month. It’s time you spill on what happened in London with Stephan.”

Tilting my head, I glare. “Really? You need details. You can’t figure out what happened.”

She matches my glare and says, “spill.”

It’s not that I have a problem talking about relationships with girlfriends. In fact, I enjoy talking about guys with them. As I think about why I haven’t spoken with any of my friends about what went down, I tell Hita, Caroline, and Kami, “I need time to process what went on in London with Stephan and me. I have no perspective to talk about it.”

In her typical persistent manner, Hita continues, “So, it wasn’t as wonderful and romantic as you had hoped for?”

“Yeah, California Stephan, the one from grad school, was very different from London Stephan.”