How to Hack a Heartbreak

by Kristin Rockaway

  “Look at the dates and times. It’s always on a weekend or late at night. He’s not in the office when this happens. Our firewall would block him from doing it on our office network, anyway.”

  “So?”

  “So, what he does on his own time is his own business.”

  “Even on a Hatch-issued laptop?”

  “Yes. You have to uninstall this immediately.”

  “But he keeps downloading viruses.”

  “That’s what you’re here for.”

  Anger threaded through my veins so forcefully I began to shake. “That’s my job? To let him screw things up and speak to me like garbage, then clean up his mess with a smile on my face?”

  Bob spread his hands and lowered his voice, like he was trying to stave off an approaching wolf. “Let’s not get hysterical, okay? He’s only gonna be here for another few weeks. Then he’ll be gone, and you’ll never see him again.”

  I knew he was talking about Josh Brewster. I knew he was referring to the way Hatch worked, bringing in a new cohort of start-up founders every three months. But my mind went straight to one question: Is this what Alex was thinking? Another few weeks, then she’ll be gone, and I’ll never see her again.

  I’d been so convinced he wouldn’t ghost on me because we worked together, not even considering that our time as coworkers was extremely limited. Sure, avoiding me around the office would be awkward, but he’d only have to do it for a few more weeks. Then he’d be gone, on to the next one, and I’d still be sitting here at Hatch, dealing with a brand-new horrible round of Hatchlings.

  Because the next round would be just as horrible as this one was. The Hatchlings were always the same: entitled, ungrateful, and abusive. I was going to be trapped here with an endless rotation of them, forever, and my boss wouldn’t even come to my defense.

  My face suddenly felt very hot. My eyes stung and my throat swelled and oh, God I was about to do the worst possible thing I could ever do. I was about to cry in front of my boss.

  Bob’s face contorted in horror. “Are you okay?”

  Shit. Shit, shit, shit.

  Rule number one in the woman techie playbook: never, ever, ever cry in front of your boss. It’s hard enough being taken seriously in this industry without wearing your emotions on your sleeve. If I cried now, any hint of respect he had for me would promptly vanish without a trace.

  So I swallowed that lump in my throat, blinked back those tears, and forced myself to put on an agreeable smile. “Of course.” I took back the laptop and said, “I’ll go clean up the virus and remove the keylogger now.”

  He narrowed his eyes, wary of my sudden willingness to comply, but ultimately, relieved not to have to deal with a weepy woman. “Good.”

  Without looking back, I fled the server room, speed-walking down the hall to the privacy of my cubicle. My eyes ached from the pressure of holding back tears. I needed to let them flow in peace.

  But as I rounded a corner, I careened face-first into a crisp button-down shirt contoured perfectly around a broad, solid chest.

  “Whoa. You okay?” Alex grabbed my shoulders, steadying me. The heat from his palms penetrated the thin cotton of my sleeves, sending warm waves across my collarbones that pooled in the hollow of my throat. He flashed me that dazzling smile.

  No. Don’t fall for it again.

  I withdrew from his grip, standing tall, smoothing the front of my shirt. “I’m fine.”

  His smile faded a bit. Less dazzling, more contrite. “Look, I’m sorry I didn’t text you last night. I wound up staying here until two in the morning trying to get the load tests right, then went home to sleep for two hours before coming back here again at six. It’s been a nightmare.”

  “You say that a lot.”

  He furrowed his brow. “What do I say a lot?”

  “That you’re sorry.”

  “Oh.” His mouth opened and closed as he struggled for words. “Did I... I mean... Is there something you want to tell me?”

  There was a lot I wanted to tell him, actually: that I’d read all about his smooth-talking past on JerkAlert. That I was terrified of letting him get close enough to hurt me. That he looked so good standing there in the middle of the hallway, I just wished he would give me a reason to trust him so we could be sharing a secret kiss right now.

  But I didn’t say anything like that. Rule number two in the woman techie playbook: never make a scene in the office.

  Instead, I gave him my standard pleasant smile. The one I gave all the Hatchlings. “No, I’m just really busy. Need to fix this thing again.” I patted Josh’s laptop, the “Free Mustache Rides” sticker making a mockery of us all. “I’ve gotta go.”

  There was hurt in Alex’s eyes. Or maybe that was wishful thinking on my part, to imagine that he cared enough about me to feel hurt by my snub.

  I brushed past him, practically running back to my cubicle, the tears already welling in my eyes. As soon as I flopped into my chair, I was filled with regret. I should’ve told him what I was really thinking, asked him flat out if he thought we had a future together or if I was just another fling. I should’ve given him a chance to explain.

  Eager for distraction, I checked my phone, and was delighted to see a text from Whit awaiting me. She’d sent me a link to a BuzzFeed article; she did this all the time. Usually, it was one of those ridiculous quizzes, like “Which Kardashian Are You?” or “Order a Starbucks Drink and We’ll Guess Your Favorite Sex Position.” Normally, I’d ignore it, but in that moment, there was nothing I needed more than a mindless diversion from reality.

  When I clicked on the link, though, it was not at all what I was expecting.

  14

  * * *

  7 JerkAlert Profiles That Have Us Saying “WTF?”

  By Kirra Boyce, BuzzFeed Staff

  Posted: Monday, April 16, 8:57 a.m.

  * * *

  Ladies, we’ve all been there: you right-swipe some dude on Fluttr who seems halfway normal, and then five minutes later, he sends you a picture of his dick. It sucks, but if you wanna play the dating game in this day and age, unsolicited dick pics are just something you have to learn to deal with, right?

  Wrong.

  Now there’s JerkAlert, a website that helps take the guesswork out of online dating. Powered by a fast-growing collection of crowdsourced info, JerkAlert (that’s .biz, not .com) lets you research a guy before you swipe right. Enter his name, age, and location into the sleek and speedy search engine, and you’ll instantly find out the answers to all your burning pre-date questions: Does he have a history of sending dick pics? Is he a serial ghoster? Has he ever been caught cheating? JerkAlert knows.

  With over a thousand men profiled (and counting), JerkAlert is a virtual treasure trove of dirt on the worst that Fluttr has to offer. From the guy who’s hiding a secret family in New Jersey to the dude who wants to be every woman’s “foot slave,” these are the top seven profiles that had us going, “WTF?”

  With a quivering thumb, I scrolled through the article, dumbstruck, reading the same sentences over and over again. It was unbelievable, really, that something I’d created on a whim was now being profiled on a website like BuzzFeed. Their readership was in the hundreds of millions. According to the stats at the bottom of the page, the article had been emailed, tweeted and shared on Facebook over five hundred times. And it had been published only a few hours ago.

  Maybe Whit was right about the whole “blowing up big-time” thing, after all.

  I texted her back: Omg.

  WHITNEY:

  Told u so.

  MEL:

  How did this happen?

  WHITNEY:

  Will explain over dinner.

  This was amazing. A feature on the front page of BuzzFeed! Whit must’ve pulled some real strings to score it.

  I read through the
article yet again, taking pleasure in words like fast-growing and sleek and speedy. My efforts were being acknowledged; my hard work was paying off. This website was actually going to go somewhere, wasn’t it? It was going to save me from the hell of the help desk.

  At least, that’s what I thought until I read the comments:

  Vlad Popov—Philadelphia, PA

  This is definitely an elaborate marketing scam by Fluttr themselves.

  Gene Steinbach—Irvine, CA

  Nah, seems like they’d be shooting themselves in the foot with this one.

  Vlad Popov—Philadelphia, PA

  No way it could be done by anyone else. Interface works so seamlessly with the app. Impossible to replicate externally.

  Michael McCarthy—Seattle, WA

  Hate to break it to you but there’s no way Fluttr would do this. They employ the best of the best in terms of coders. This JerkAlert website is a slow and clunky POS.

  Gene Steinbach—Irvine, CA

  1, Michael. “Sleek and speedy,” my ass.

  My heart thudded in my ears. I should’ve known better than to read these; nothing good ever comes from spending time in the comments section. But I couldn’t unsee them, and now I was furious. How dare this internet rando call JerkAlert “slow and clunky”? As if Gene Steinbach or Michael McCarthy could do any better.

  Though it’s not like I knew them. Maybe they could code a better website than the one I’d put together. Maybe I was deluding myself, and JerkAlert really was a POS.

  To be certain, I pulled the site up in my browser, only to find that it was indeed loading slowly, taking forever to perform searches and display images. But when I signed into the dashboard, it all made sense: traffic had more than quadrupled overnight, with thousands of new records added to the database and hundreds of new registered users. Visitors came from places as far away as London and Sydney, Hong Kong and Paris. JerkAlert had gone international.

  So, naturally, the site was behaving sluggishly. When I built it, I’d never in my wildest dreams imagined it would reach this scope of influence, with thousands of people from all over the world interacting with it at once. If I wanted people to be impressed by how sleek and speedy my website was, I needed to make some changes. And I needed to do it now, before JerkAlert got a reputation as a “slow and clunky POS.”

  Josh would have to wait a little while longer for his laptop.

  * * *

  From: Melanie Strickland

  To: Joshua Brewster

  Subject: Minor Delay

  Hi Josh,

  I’ve hit a tiny snag while restoring your laptop. It’s going to take a little while longer than normal to fix it, but you’ll definitely have it back before the end of the day.

  Thanks,

  Melanie

  * * *

  Usually, I hated to send out emails like this. Being late made it seem like I was incompetent or couldn’t deliver on my promises. But I was beginning to realize that it didn’t really matter how well I performed at work. Whether I completed my tasks flawlessly or consistently screwed up, the Hatchlings would always treat me like trash. Case in point, Josh’s response:

  * * *

  From: Joshua Brewster

  To: Melanie Strickland

  Subject: re: Minor Delay

  Fucking figures.

  * * *

  Why should I continue to kill myself working hard for these ungrateful start-up founders? Even when I did everything right, Bob would defend them and scold me. I was much better off half-assing it around the office, prioritizing JerkAlert and making it the best it could possibly be. That’s the only way I’d ever found a start-up of my own.

  For the next couple of hours, I focused on optimizing my code, reconfiguring my server settings, and restructuring my database. It was the most I could do without upgrading my web hosting to a more expensive plan—which was definitely something I could not afford to do right now (or anytime in the foreseeable future). But it was more than sufficient, because as soon as I uploaded my changes, response times and page loads improved almost instantly.

  Take that, Gene Steinbach and Michael McCarthy.

  Feeling confident and accomplished, I moved on to the mind-numbing task of cleaning up Josh’s infected laptop. While the scanner searched for contaminated files, I read the BuzzFeed article for approximately the millionth time. And because I apparently enjoy making myself miserable, I went back to the comments section. Part of me had hoped to find people saying how speedy the site suddenly seemed, and berating Gene and Michael for their asinine remarks.

  Of course, that wasn’t happening. Instead, I found this gem:

  Frankie Fanning—New York, NY

  I’d say some frigid bitch made this website, but we all know girls can’t code for shit.

  My vision went blurry around the edges and my breath became ragged puffs of air.

  We all know girls can’t code for shit.

  It’s the kind of thing I always suspected men were thinking when they looked at me. Like when the guys at tech meetups told me I didn’t look like a developer, or spent their time hitting on me instead of inquiring about my credentials. I’d even been aware of it back in college, when my classmates would ignore my suggestions during group work, and my professors would tell sexist jokes like I wasn’t in the lecture hall.

  To see it here, typed out in black-and-white, confirmed my worst fears: in this industry, I’d always be viewed as inferior, and it had nothing to do with my actual skill, and everything to do with my gender.

  What I wanted right now, more than anything else in the world, was to tell everyone out there that a girl was responsible for creating this site. A girl had designed it, a girl had coded it, a girl was keeping it going through a period of tremendous growth.

  And a girl was going to get rich off it.

  My fingers flew to the keyboard, ready to type up a response to this asshole, Frankie Fanning. He was going to know exactly who he was dealing with: a woman who was no longer interested in taking anyone’s shit. But as I sat there, stringing angry words together in a text box, I quickly realized that outing myself in the comments section of a BuzzFeed article was a terrible idea. Nothing good ever came from reacting in a moment of rage, and it certainly wouldn’t reflect well on me as a woman, who already suffered the stigma of being “too emotional.”

  I needed to stay calm, to think this through, to devise a deliberate and effective plan for revealing my identity to the public. Closing my web browser and ignoring the comments section was a good first step.

  The second step: consult Whitney. With her PR expertise, she’d know exactly what to do.

  15

  “Don’t do it.”

  Whit’s feelings about my desire to go public were unambiguous.

  This was not the response I had hoped for. I’d envisioned squeals of delight, enthusiastic high fives, publicity plans plotted out on cocktail napkins. Instead, Whitney shook her head with disdain, as if I should’ve already known it was a stupid idea.

  “Anonymity is part of the allure,” she said. “Nobody knows who’s posting what, or where JerkAlert even came from. Keeping your identity a secret will help generate buzz.”

  “Hasn’t enough buzz already been generated?” Dani chimed in.

  “This is nothing.” Whit waved her hand dismissively and brought her wineglass to her lips. “Investors aren’t gonna come running with cash in hand over one measly BuzzFeed article.”

  “It doesn’t feel like nothing,” I said. “Do you know how many unique visitors JerkAlert had yesterday? Three thousand, six hundred and fifteen.”

  “Is that more than you usually have?”

  “Yeah. Like fifty times more.”

  “Wow,” Lia said. “Do you know how that #JerkAlert hashtag got started?”

  The smirk on Whit’s red
lips was all the answer we needed.

  “It was you?”

  “Hashtags are one of the best ways to launch an organic marketing campaign.”

  “But how did you get it to trend like that?”

  “It wasn’t hard. I picked some of the more heinous JerkAlert profiles and tagged a few influencers who I know are single and dating. They tagged their friends, who tagged their friends and so on, until it exploded.” She sipped her wine. “I also hooked into #DickInTheDark.”

  “What?” That damn hashtag was just beginning to fade from the collective memory. The last thing I wanted was for Whit to resurrect those awful memes and connect them to my burgeoning tech venture.

  “Calm down,” she said, “it’s no biggie. I just said things like, ‘Avoid a #DickInTheDark with #JerkAlert.’ It helped to increase visibility. Then I shot a casual email off to Kirra and said she might consider covering it for BuzzFeed. The rest is history.”

  Our server dropped by with a tray of sliders ordered off the happy hour menu for five bucks a pop.

  “Here you are, ladies,” he said, as he placed the dishes down in front of us. “Three beef, three veggie, and two crispy fish.”

  “Oh my God, these look amazing,” Whitney said.

  “My personal favorite is the fish.” He crouched down slightly and leaned toward Whitney, as if she was the only person at the table. “But watch out for the jalapeños.”

  Never one to turn away from blatant flirtation, she bit back a smile. “Thanks for the warning, but I can handle the heat.”

  Dani didn’t even try to contain her laughter at that cheesy line. It didn’t faze Whit or the waiter, though. They held each other’s gazes, steady and smoldering, until the woman at the next table loudly demanded more bread. As the waiter turned away to fetch a new basket, Whit’s eyes stayed glued to his backside.