“Just like you can’t rely on customers to tell you what they want when they haven’t seen it, you also can’t rely on them to tell you what’s wrong when they haven’t figured it out.”
I waved away this koan. There were always more mysteries than there were hours in the day—and I didn’t have the techie disease of going down the irrelevant rabbit holes posed by random puzzles that had no relationship to the goal. I needed to summarize my experience on Vegnor into a process that could be repeated so that I could come up with something else to top the Vegnor. In a place like weRobot, you were only as good as your next project. PMs who rested on their laurels didn’t get invited to the next Fall Picnic.
Amy was about to speak again when an e-mail alert dinged on my computer.
“Sorry, I have to get this.” Almost compulsively, I clicked over to the tab. I was feeling irritable these days, hoping each e-mail would be from someone important in the company, inviting me to join a team with more prestige, closer to Jake and Ron.
Wait, I chided myself. I meant a team with projects that made a bigger impact on people’s lives, right? Am I more interested in climbing the corporate ladder or changing the world? Is there a difference?
The e-mail turned out to be from my sister, Emily. All her e-mails these days contained pictures of her new baby. Sure, I loved my nephew, but he couldn’t even talk, and I was sick of watching another video of him rolling around on the floor for “tummy time.” Parents were the most boring creatures on earth.
. . . Danny won’t sleep . . . I think I’m going slowly insane. I can’t even hear myself think. I’ll pay anything . . .
“. . . are you going to investigate the correlations? Aren’t you even a little bit curious?”
I looked up. Somehow Amy was still standing there, babbling about something. “Isn’t there some seminar you need to get to?” I asked pointedly.
She shook her head and threw up her hands in an I give up gesture. “Chenza at court, the court of silence,” she muttered as she moved away.
I felt bad that she was feeling rejected. But I wasn’t a cynical engineer too jaded to feel the thrill of changing the world. I had been to the Fall Picnic, damn it. I had a purpose.
*
There were close to forty-five million children under the age of twelve in the United States. Demographic trends and migration patterns and immigration laws and regulatory pressure added to a situation where an increasing number of parents were without access to affordable, high-quality, and trusted child care. People were working longer hours and working harder, leaving less time and energy for their children.
Big data analytics backed up my hunch. WeRobot’s web spiders crawled through parenting forums and social networks and anonymous confessplaint apps and crunched the mood and emotional content of posts by parents of young children. The dominant note was a sense of exhaustion, of guilt, of worry that they weren’t doing a good job as mothers and fathers. There was little faith in day-care centers and in-home help—parents didn’t trust strangers, and yet they simply couldn’t do everything themselves.
It was the ultimate opportunity for a labor-saving device. What if the drudgery of parenting—the midnight feedings, the diaper changes, the perpetual and endless cleaning and picking up and laundry runs, the tantrums, the sicknesses, the monitoring and measuring mandated by pediatricians, the meting out of discipline and punishment—all could be taken care of by a perfect nanny, leaving parents only the joy of true quality time with their offspring?
*
“You’ve been reading that e-mail for ten minutes,” Amy said. “That’s never a good sign.”
I had read the e-mail so many times that the words no longer made sense. But really, all the verbiage on the screen could be reduced to a single word.
“They said no.”
To her credit, Amy said nothing. She went away and came back a few minutes later with a mug of tea and set it down on my desk. I picked it up, comforted by the warmth.
“I brought you a gift, too,” she said. “I was going to give it to you when Vegnor launched, but it took longer to get ready than I anticipated—typical engineering scheduling, you know. Figure you could use a bit of cheering up.”
She whistled, and a sleek Vegnor, painted black, slinked into view from beyond the cubicle wall.
“This is no ordinary Vegnie,” she said. “I’ve reprogrammed it to be the ultimate office prankster. You can tell it to squirt hot sauce in the coffee of the marketing department or tell lawyer jokes from behind the HVAC grille in the legal group. Heck, you can even get it to steal the lunch of whichever VP just told you no. But you have to learn to speak its language.”
She bent down to the little mechanical rat. “Bigwig, standing on Watership Down with ears plugged.” She frowned in a pretty good impression of the VP of Product Marketing. Then she turned to me. “Want to try?”
I looked at the rat, pointed at Amy and then myself. “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra”—Amy smiled—“Vegnie, the cheese of the Bigwig in the Labyrinth of Knossos.”
The little rat chirped and scuttled away.
I clapped my hands. “That is inspired.”
“I should know learning to speak Tamarian is easy for a folk and myth major.”
When we finally finished giggling, I said, “I don’t understand why they didn’t approve my project. Given my track record on Vegnor, they should have more trust in me.”
“It’s not a matter of trust. The problem you’re proposing to solve is too hard. People can’t even agree on the best way to sleep-train a baby. How do you propose to make the perfect substitute parent?”
“That’s just the result of overthinking. People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
“You’re too young to understand that you should never give parenting advice.”
“You’re too cynical. Even if there isn’t a single right answer for something, we can always make it into a user-accessible setting.”
Amy shook her head. “This isn’t like designing a robot to clean the gutters. You’re talking about raising other people’s children. The liability issues alone will make everyone in legal faint.”
“You can’t let lawyers run a company,” I said. “Isn’t weRobot about thinking impossible? There’s always a solution.”
“Maybe you should create an island where there are no rules so you can experiment with technical solutions to all life’s problems to your heart’s content.”
“That would be nice,” I muttered.
“You’re scaring me, kid.”
I didn’t answer.
*
Jake and Ron had always prided themselves on maintaining an entrepreneurial spirit in weRobot, even as it grew to thousands of employees. Those who got invited to the Fall Picnic were expected to get things done, not wait for orders.
So I did the natural thing: telling my team that my proposal had been approved.
The next step was to recruit Dr. Vignor to the effort.
“That’s a very difficult challenge,” he said.
“You’re right,” I said. “Probably much too hard. I’ll file it away until we have the brainpower.”