The Silicon Jungle

by Shumeet Baluja

  “Why are you here? Don’t get me wrong; we all love having you here. But it’s been more than two and a half years now. Isn’t it time you found something better to do? If you don’t mind me saying, Stephen, it’s like you’ve given up, and that’s ridiculous. Stop wasting your time here.” Allison was the first HR person to be this honest.

  2:10 a.m., nearby at the gas station food counter, while having coffee with a side of hotdogs that had been turning on the cooker long enough to be packaged as Slim-Jims: “This will be the last of our nightly food runs,” Stephen began somberly once they were all seated. “I wanted you all to be the first to know. The rest of our promised funding is being withdrawn. We’re closing down Steel-Xchange in two weeks. I’m announcing it officially tomorrow.” He noticed a few surprised expressions, but most had already suspected. Six months after they moved to California, the dot-com bubble burst, and the consequences to SteelXchange.com were clear. “I’m going to help all of you find jobs. I promise. I’ll make it right. It’s not your fault, any of you. We did the best we could. I should have known better.”

  The brutality with which the funding was taken away even exceeded the excitement with which it had been given—the backrooms, cigars, and dignified single malt scotches that were de rigueur for closing the deals where steel was bought, sold, and traded were working perfectly fine, thank you. And, despite the repeated and loud cries of “lack of efficiency” and “backwardness” and much worse name-calling from the technologists in California, the steel titans seemed little fazed, if they heard the cries at all.

  Stephen turned his head, imperceptibly sighed, and waited. All he could see, from his vantage point under the large desk, was the bottom of Allison’s grey skirt and her exposed calves as she rose from her chair to pace the office. He couldn’t see her face, and she couldn’t see his either. “There are so many companies around here that would hire you in a second. I think you could be part of something really big, who knows? I’m saying this to you as a friend, you know, and not as HR. As a manager, and as HR, of course I want you to stay here. But, come on Stephen, you and I both know you should be doing something else.”

  “What am I going to do now? I followed you and Arthur out here from Pittsburgh. I thought you guys were on to something. What happened?” a woman, mother of two and Pittsburgh Steel Exchange’s fourth employee, asked. Stephen stammered out the now all too familiar consolatory words, “Give me your resume and I’ll work with you on it until we find something for you. I’m sorry. I’m just really sorry for all of this. Go home and tell your family that it’ll be okay. I’ll find you something.” Another heap of worries to add to his own. SteelXchange.com had seventy employees when the news came of its closing.

  He resumed his long list of calls to every VC and colleague he had met in the last six months. He began the conversations with “I need a personal favor,” anything to help his team. They were, after all, his responsibility. It would have been nice if Arthur had made some of the phone calls, too. But Arthur had departed immediately, disassociating himself from the failure that was Steel Xchange. No black marks on his resumé.

  Allison continued on, but his attention was long gone. He was watching her legs as she paced around the room. She didn’t have her shoes on, and he felt sorry she had to walk on such a dingy, disgusting, old carpet. He followed her legs as they moved back and forth across the office. Her voice was gentle. He wasn’t sure what her words were, but he was positive he’d heard this conversation before. He knew it by heart.

  He watched her. The anklets she was wearing on both legs—he’d never noticed them before. If she stopped speaking at just the right moment when her legs happened to touch, he could just barely make out the sounds of the anklets as they softly rubbed against each other. At every step, he held his breath for that extra little bit of silence, and listened for the quiet chimes again.

  She spoke for a few more minutes; eventually it occurred to him that he’d been under the desk for too long. He clumsily maneuvered to sit up in his little space. Finally peering out of his makeshift cubby, he found Allison’s face looking back from only a few inches away.

  “Hey,” she said in a surprised voice, “I thought that you had fallen asleep on me. Tell me you heard at least some of what I said.”

  “Yeah, I did. Thanks, Mrs. Glace,” he replied quietly. “You’re right. It’s a lot to think about. You know that I really do enjoy it here, but I’ll think about it. Promise I will.”

  Allison only half smiled back at him. He suspected she would do the same to her son. “Okay, but really think about it, Stephen. Life’s too short, you know.”

  “Don’t worry about me, Stephen. I’ve already found a job,” said Ryan, one of Arthur’s assistants and a friend to everyone in the company. “GreeneSmart was hiring, and I accepted a job there this morning. You should visit sometime. The café has better food than those gas stations you keep going to,” he said, trying to cheer up Stephen.

  Stephen did visit Ryan—two days after SteelXchange closed permanently. Stephen ran into the head of tech-support at the store, a meeting he was sure Ryan had arranged. “So, you’re Stephen? Ryan has told me so much about you; you’re the tech whiz-kid. We could really use you—our PCs and fax machines are a mess. Think you can help us out?” The man was as welcoming as could be. It wasn’t remotely similar to the type of work Stephen did, though he was certain Ryan had the best intentions. A lack of a backup plan, the need to get some rest from thinking about what he had done to twenty-one people, or simply the desire to be with a friend for a few weeks while he figured things out—whatever the reason, Stephen accepted a part-time job working directly for the head of tech support at GreeneSmart. Two and a half years later, Ryan had long since left and Arthur had returned to graduate school. Stephen was coasting, working full-time at GreeneSmart.

  The conversation was at an end. Stephen sprang up, perhaps a bit too quickly since Allison had to hastily step out of his way. He thought about giving her a hug; it was good to know someone cared about him. He hoped he had been like this with his employees, too, but perhaps those were different times.

  Seventy people had trusted him. For forty-nine of those seventy, he had found employment. But for the remaining twenty-one, the wreckage of the dot-coms around him was less forgiving—a fact Stephen could not forget. Weeks after SteelXchange’s closing, the calls started coming in: “Are you okay?” they all wondered. With tempers soothed, his former team remembered to inquire about how he had fared. Four weeks after the debacle, not a single person, not even those who had returned to Pittsburgh poorer and more in debt than they ever had been, blamed Stephen.

  Instead of confiding any of this, or even just giving Allison the hug he had so wanted to, he awkwardly mumbled an excuse for his too-quick rise, and stumbled out the door.

  -ANTHROPOLOGISTS

  IN THE MIDST-

  March, 2005.

  Molly Byrne, age twenty-three, Cameroon, Africa. Seven months of applications and three months of training—yet, what the Peace Corps training had least prepared her for was simply feeling overwhelmingly isolated. Forty-two days into her assignment in Cameroon, and friends were still hard to find. The only person who treated her like anything but a novelty item was Sandrine, a beautiful fourteen-year-old girl with eyes that no National Geographic magazine cover could ever do justice. Sandrine had befriended her on her first day. Sandrine and her one-year-old son, Francis, were as close to friends as Molly had.

  From Molly’s Cameroon Diary:

  Day 42: Sandrine is now officially the only one who hasn’t yet begged to see my cell phone or my stash of cigarette cartons that I keep for trading. Had I known, I would have brought plenty more—and Froot Loops, everybody loves Froot Loops here. I buy them at every chance. I try to teach Sandrine English, and she tries her hardest to keep me from embarrassing myself too much. fourteen years old, with a kid, and she’s teaching me how to survive here . . . Life here is like living under a microscope. Eve
rybody is watching me constantly. There is no break; I can’t just go home to wind down. My host family is just as fascinated with me as I am with them. Everything I do is watched and reported on; the village knows my every action and seemingly my every thought, too. I should probably be . . .

  Molly had wanted to write more that morning, but when the stabbing pain close to her shoulder was enough to make her cry out loud and writhe on the filthy floor in agony, she had needed to stop.

  “You are from America?” the doctor asked as he put his hands on her neck from behind, pressing his dark fingers deeply into her white skin. He already knew she was from America; everybody there knew she was.

  “Yes,” Molly replied. Say as little as possible. To talk more would only provide further interactions to misconstrue.

  “Take off your shirt,” the doctor said. “For your heart,” he offered as an explanation. He took a step back and nodded approvingly as she pulled her shirt up. He looked disappointed when she didn’t take it off completely.

  The doctor was an old man with cold hands that trembled as he laid his stethoscope on her chest. He listened for a long minute, then moved in closer to her. She could feel his breath too close to her body. She stared at the bald spot on his head, hoping he would just once dare to look up at her face. He would understand what her expression was saying, that she knew what he was doing—and that she wasn’t going to let it go any further. But he never looked up, he kept his gaze low.

  She didn’t need to be here, she thought to herself. The pain had subsided by the time she made it to the doctor’s office. But Sandrine had insisted she should go inside to see the doctor anyway. He was a good man; he would know for sure if everything was okay, Sandrine promised.

  His hand wandered lower. “Okay,” Molly said loudly enough to disturb whatever fantasy was building in his head.

  “Of course, of course. Everything is fine. Do not worry. Come back tomorrow, and I can check again. Maybe tomorrow, you bring a little gift?”

  Molly pulled down her shirt quickly, self-conscious and furious at once—but saying nothing. She was fuming enough to know better than to speak. Blurting out anything now would only mean that the rest of the village would know about it long before she made it back home.

  She opened the door out of the doctor’s office without looking at him again. The room outside was overflowing with others waiting for his attention. Sandrine was, thankfully, standing by the door when she exited, ready to take her home.

  “Sandrine, comment ça va?” the doctor called from inside his office as he spotted her through the open door. “You should come see me for a checkup,” he suggested, nodding his head upward in a smile. Before Sandrine could reply, Molly took her by the elbow and pulled her quickly from his office.

  “He’s not a good doctor, Sandrine. Promise me you will find another,” Molly whispered as they were leaving the waiting room. She was only 14. God knows what he would do to her.

  “He is Francis’s papa, Molly. He is a good man.”

  Enough. Molly left Francis and Sandrine standing at the entrance of the building. Before there was time to reconsider, she strode into the doctor’s office, grabbed the first thing her hands could fit around, a half-filled heavy glass bottle, and swung it at the doctor. The woman on the examination table was yelling, the doctor’s face was bleeding where two teeth had burst their way through the now dangling flesh of his cheek, and everyone in the waiting room was moving in for a closer look.

  Seven months of applications, three months of training, and forty-two days in Cameroon. She was taken home before the week ended, having been deemed by the village, and the Peace Corps, to have “too intense a disposition to continue.”

  -MOLLYCODDLE-

  February, 2009.

  “Why do you need another computer again, Molly?” Trisha asked as she stepped into position behind the electronics center at GreeneSmart. “I’ve had mine for two years now, and it’s doing fine. If you ask me, there are plenty of other things to spend money on.”

  “I know, I know. But it’s for my research project. Anyway, just let me know later today if you find something back here that I can afford. I need to get one quickly.” Molly scooted away to ensure she made it to her own station in the children’s clothing department before her manager appeared. “I’ve got to run now. You know which department to find me in, okay? And don’t forget, you promised to help me set it up when I get it.” Molly gave an appreciative smile to Trisha before disappearing behind the shelves of DVDs.

  “Whatever,” Trisha muttered under her breath. In the three minutes before the store officially opened, Trisha checked their inventory, found a cheap computer for Molly, and had time to consider if she could convince Molly to spend her money more wisely. In the end, though, she decided it wasn’t worth the effort, and resigned herself to finding a way out of setting up the computer for Molly.

  Forty seconds remained before the front doors were officially unlocked; the intercom was fair game. “Stephen, report to electronics,” Trisha’s voice roared through GreeneSmart. For several months after Stephen first arrived, she had given him plenty of easy opportunities to ask her out. He was cute enough that she had even considered asking him. But she never did, and a good thing, too; he was far too quiet and shy.

  Just like every other day, the first call came before the store opened. On the inside, Stephen thought, “What now?” On the outside, he happily declared, “Good morning, Trisha. What can I do for you?”

  “Molly needs your help. She’s setting up her new computer tonight, and she wanted me to ask if you had some time to help her?” He instantly agreed, as Trisha knew he would. What guy wouldn’t gladly do anything for Molly? Long brown hair, smarter than anyone else she knew, intense, and intensely pretty. More than pretty when she actually tried, Trisha thought. Some people have all the . . . , Trisha started, but the rest of the thought was too obvious to go on.

  Trisha hurriedly called Molly on her cell phone the moment Stephen left, “I can’t make it tonight. But you know Stephen Thorpe? The tech-guy? He volunteered to help you with your computer.” Before Molly could question her any further, Stephen anxiously showed up in the children’s clothing section to make the plans in person.

  “All done!” Stephen happily exclaimed around 9:30 that evening. Molly’s new computer was ready to go. “You just need to type your password right here, and you’re all set.” Stephen stepped out of the way to let her reach the keyboard.

  So far, they hadn’t spoken much. They had driven separately in their own cars to her apartment, and since then, he’d been busy with the new computer. Although they had talked a few times at the store, they were probably best described as acquaintances rather than friends.

  Molly replied without moving, “Just use ‘mollycoddle.’ That’ll be good enough. I always use that.” Stephen’s blank expression compelled her to spell it for him. “It means you’re taking good care of me,” she explained. Stephen finished typing it in, still a bit uncomfortable about Molly trusting him with her password.

  “Thanks so much for setting this up for me. I’m sure it would have taken me days to figure it all out. I’m not really a tech person, as you’ve probably guessed by now.” Molly sat down in front of the monitor to take the computer for a test drive.

  “Oh, there’s not much to it. It took so long just to get everything installed to protect it from viruses and all that good stuff. Just to make sure you’re safe.” The expression on Molly’s face revealed nothing; it was impossible to tell whether she was interested, bored, or just being patient. He continued on, uncertainly, “It’ll also keep your machine from being hacked into, and keep all your personal files and information private. Nobody should be able to break into it.” Just stop talking, she doesn’t care. Why am I saying this aloud? He was coming across like all the stereotypes he was trying his hardest to avoid.

  But if she noticed his awkwardness, she was kind enough not to openly show it. “Thank you so much. I c
an’t believe how nice you’ve been. Tell me why you’re working at GreeneSmart if you can do all this so quickly? You should really be working somewhere else.”

  “Mmm-hmm. I’ve heard that before.”

  “You know, we are in the heart of Silicon Valley. Have you ever thought about working for a startup, or maybe working for Ubatoo? They’re always hiring, and from what I hear, they treat their employees pretty well, too—better than GreeneSmart, I’d imagine.”

  “Thanks, but I don’t think that’s the right life for me. Setting up computers is one thing, but I think I’ll need quite a bit more than that to get a job there.”

  “Don’t they have a contest for finding summer interns coming up?”

  He looked at her surprised. “How did you—”

  “How did I know?” she interrupted. “You mean besides the billboard advertisements they have all over town? It’s pretty hard to miss, even for an ass-backwards techno-phobe like me,” she said jokingly. Then, she recited the all-too-familiar billboard to him verbatim, “Got what it takes? Prove it. InternSearch@Ubatoo.com.”

  It was true. The quote was plastered all over Silicon Valley and heard on radio and TV constantly. She grabbed his hand and led him to the window. “Besides, I see their billboard every day—it’s right there,” she said, letting go of his hand far sooner than he would have liked. “Their offices are only a couple of blocks away. Besides, I’m sure you’re just being modest; you’d get an offer no problem. All I’m going to say is that I think you should at least try it.”

  Before Stephen could argue about how different the required skills were between setting up her computer and what it would take to get into Ubatoo, Molly had changed topics. “How about some dinner? I owe you that much. I can order some amazingly good sandwiches. They’re really much better than the hotdogs I see you stealing from Greene Smart’s café.”