Sad Desk Salad
Authors: Jessica Grose
Tags: #Humorous, #Satire, #Contemporary Women, #Fiction
Sad Desk Salad
JESSICA GROSE
To Hanna Rosin and Anna Holmes, the best bosses a girl could ever ask for
Contents
Dedication
MONDAY
Chapter One
Chapter Two
TUESDAY
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
WEDNESDAY
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
THURSDAY
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
FRIDAY
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
MONDAY MORNING, NINE MONTHS LATER
Chapter Fifteen
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
The alarm on my iPhone goes off at 6:20. I crawl out of my rumpled bed and shuffle to the kitchen, where my morning coffee is waiting. I’ve set the timer on the Krups so that I can start sipping a cup by 6:22. By 6:23 I’m sitting upright on our mottled brown corduroy couch. My MacBook is open and pinwheeling awake at 6:24.
I turn on the TV and flip to the
Today
show, which I keep on low in the background. Every day I watch the
Today
show and never
Good Morning America
or
The Early Show
or whatever clowns they have on Fox. George Stephanopoulos is intrinsically smug, so I can’t hold with
GMA
.
Today
has Natalie Morales, whom I implicitly trust. This morning Savannah Guthrie is interviewing the parents of a four-year-old who can’t stop coughing. While I’m watching the wretched toddler in her mother’s arms, I hear my computer chirp an alert.
MoiraPoira (6:25:22):
Good morning, sunshine.
Alex182 (6:25:24):
Merrrr
That’s my boss, Moira, who IMs me immediately after I log on. I’m Alex, one of four writers at a website for women called Chick Habit.
The website is Moira’s baby. She started out fresh out of the University of Dublin working at a tabloid newspaper in Ireland called the
Evening Mews
. When she was twenty-four, she famously discovered the hotel in the Canary Islands where the bad-boy goalie of Irish football, Eamon Best, was getting married to a very orange British reality television star.
Moira rented a room overlooking the beach where the ceremony was being held and got the exclusive scoop on the bride’s Swarovski-crystal-encrusted gown-kini. Alledgedly, she even managed to plant a recording device in the floppy ear of a stuffed bunny rabbit tucked away in the couple’s Gran Palmas suite. That’s how she got the dirt about the groom arranging an illicit rendezvous with one of the equally orange bridesmaids mere hours after the nuptials. For this, Moira was promoted to features editor before her twenty-fifth birthday.
At twenty-nine she was poached by one of the fancy women’s glossies and moved to New York. She was bored with the magazine instantly—all the women who worked there had young babies and well-appointed apartments north of Sixtieth Street. Moira had dead houseplants and sex with guys in the bathrooms of posh members-only clubs. She was like a Bengal tiger in one of her fancy colleagues’ chintz-covered living rooms. When an opportunity arose for her to start Chick Habit, with its ’round-the-clock posting and frenzied pace, she jumped at the chance.
But it wasn’t just the fusty ladies at the established magazine that made her want to set out on her own. She wanted to be part of something that was much sharper and a little meaner. She also wanted it to be “empowered.” I’ve been working for her for six months and it still isn’t 100 percent clear to me what that word means to her, except that I am encouraged to express my deep hatred for Gwyneth Paltrow and write about period sex. What is clear is that the site is hitting a nerve. Even the posts that have less than a thousand page views get upwards of fifty comments from variously engaged silly, militant, and underemployed young women.
Moira has me do the first post of the day, every day, in part because I’m the only Chickie she can count on to wake up before seven. “You’re so Japanese,” Moira always says, which, since I’m not actually Asian, is her vaguely racist but pretty amusing way of telling me that I’m dutiful. I wasn’t so focused before I had this job, so I appreciate her attempt at a compliment. I have about ninety minutes to find something, read it, consider it, and then spew out something publishable by eight
A.M
. That’s the most time I will get for a post all day.
MoiraPoira (6:25:30):
Glad you’re so chipper this AM, kiddo. Here are some links to choose from. The first is about a campaign to stop female genital mutilation in Somalia. The second is about some former beauty queen in Mississippi who is now a meth-head and held up a supermarket. The third is about a study that shows how women can close the gender gap among physicists. The fourth is about a new law in Nebraska that outlaws late-term abortion.
These topics are among the most serious that Chick Habit covers. The eight o’clock post is the hard-news post, which comes right before the first gossip roundup. Moira gave me this assignment because these are the kinds of things I used to write lengthy features about in college. Topics for this post fall roughly into three categories: sad foreign ladies, dead babies, sexist statistics.
The female-genital-mutilation link is from the
Guardian
and I feel like I wrote a post on the horrors of FGM just a couple of weeks ago. Sad foreign ladies are good for audience interaction (typical comment: “The patriarchal domination of our world’s most vulnerable women makes me stabby!”) but bad for traffic. My last post on a woman in Iran whose brothers beat her for going to school only got eight hundred page views. Same goes for sexist statistics. Maybe it’s worthwhile to write about how only 4 percent of philosophers are women, but most of our readers couldn’t care less. Or, more accurately, they just don’t care as much as they do about Lindsay Lohan’s latest trip to rehab.
When I started this job in January, I didn’t really think about the traffic to my posts. I still remember the first post I was really proud of. It came through our tips line—a woman in Memphis wrote to tell us that prosecutors declined to try her rape case because she wasn’t the perfect victim; she had consumed a few exotic-berry wine coolers before she was violated, and she had a prior record for stealing a strappy tank top from Walmart. I wrote about her story, and it felt really good to give voice to someone whose rights were being stifled.
And 147 people read about it.
At the time the lack of reader interest stung a little—why didn’t they care more about something so meaningful?—and I was worried about impressing my new boss. But Moira never used to pressure us about whether a post had a hundred views or a hundred thousand. Then last month she received a message from the lackeys of Tyson Collins, the Southern billionaire who owns the faceless cable conglomerate that owns Chick Habit: Our page views were growing impressively, but not fast enough. Each of us Chickies was given a monthly quota of views—one million a month. If we surpass the quota we get a bonus. It’s made us all much more territorial, not only because of the money, but because of the implied flip side: losing our jobs if we only get 999,999 page views. I’ve been trying not to let this vague but serious threat affect my work.
Alex182 (6:25:55):
I guess I’ll go with the meth lady. She looks festive.
I do a search on the woman’s name—Desiree Jiminez—and find stories about the hold-up in the local Jackson paper, on CNN’s website, and from abcnews.com. I scan all three stories and discover that Desiree was Miss Congeniality and first runner-up in the 1997 Miss Mississippi pageant. I find her Facebook page—she hasn’t put up any privacy protections, so I can see all her photos. There’s one of her with crown and all, atop a podium at a day-care center in Choctaw County. Her hair was magnificent back then: a halo of bleached blond fluff teased into a perfect sphere floating above her head. According to cnn.com, in the intervening decade she fell on hard times and several ex-cons. In the mug shot they show, she has a tattoo on her upper right arm that says
STEVE
in gothic lettering. Her hair is no longer magnificent. It hangs in lank brown bunches next to her face.
While I’m reading up on Desiree’s exploits, my boyfriend, Peter, gets up and ambles over to the coffeepot. I’m still clad in his old boxers and a frayed T-shirt that says
JE T’AIME, MONTREAL!
—what I slept in the night before.
“Hey, Al, what’s on the Interwebs this morning?”
“Methy former beauty queen . . . Big hair,” I mutter.
“Oh yeah? Sounds thrilling.”
Peter is one of those incorrigible morning people, and almost every day he tries to talk to me while I’m doing the first post. He walks briskly through our low-slung garden apartment, his nearly black hair catching the light, and when I look up to admire him in his boxer briefs, he takes the opportunity to engage me in conversation. I’ve told him over and over again that I can’t really talk while I’m working but this does not seem to deter him.
In a few minutes he’ll shower and put on his suit—he works in finance, at a place called the Polydrafter Group. He’s an analyst specializing in media, and I only have a faint idea about what he does all day—though I do know there are a lot of Excel spreadsheets involved. Before I met him at a friend’s birthday party I was only attracted to artists: skinny guys in tight pants who were always talking about their latest installation at some unfortunate gallery in Bushwick. The breakup with my last boyfriend, Caleb, a mercurial mixed-media artist, was brutal. About a month before we parted ways, he said I was too neurotic and dramatic for him. I took this to mean that he wanted to be the spaz in the relationship. Peter doesn’t mind so much that I’m intense. “It keeps things exciting,” he tells me.
I’ve also cleaned up my act considerably since I met Peter, curbing my emotional and alcoholic excesses for our life together. I’ve always heard that animal trainers put goats in the stable with particularly high-strung racehorses because the goats are calm yet stubborn and the Thoroughbreds chill out. Peter’s innate goatishness—he likes me for who I am, but he still doesn’t take any guff—has made our relationship the best thing in my life. I never thought that I would find joy in planning and cooking meals for someone (so Suzy Homemaker!), but I love Peter so much that I relish the idea of nourishing him. I’d like to think that he inspires me to be a better person.
As Peter is putting on his blue tie with the gray stripes, the one I bought him for his last birthday, I am putting the finishing touches on my post about Desiree. It’s 342 words and I title it “Desiree Jiminez, Former Miss Congeniality, Holds Up the Piggly Wiggly.” I make sure to put her name at the beginning of the headline, so my post will show up when people Google her. After ten minutes, it’s got 4,332 page views, and I feel like I can relax a bit. I get up on my tiptoes to kiss Peter before he walks out the door. He’s six foot one to my five foot seven, and in his fancy work shoes the height disparity seems even greater. As we’re embracing I catch him sniffing my hair.
“Alex, are you going to shower this morning?”
“Maybe?”
“I think you’ll be happier if you do.”
“Okay, okay, I’ll try.”
When I watch him leave through our tiny front door, ducking his head so he doesn’t thwack it on the concrete, I fully intend to head to the bathroom. But I can picture Moira’s angry IM in my head—“WHERE ARE YOU?” in all caps—and it pulls me back to the couch instead. Eight turns into nine and I’m sucking down room-temperature coffee, trying to find my next post. I’ve pinned my slightly filthy dark blond bangs back with a bobby pin I found on the floor so that they stay out of my eyes and don’t make my forehead break out.