The office itself was a big room where everyone sat at long tables. There were huge windows on the south side that made everything very bright much of the time. The other three sides were lined by several meeting rooms, a canteen, and a lounge with couches; on the walls were prints with cheeky inspirational sayings like I’M NOT HERE TO BE AVERAGE, I’M HERE TO BE AWESOME and DO EPIC SHIT. The only actual office was a glass-walled room in the corner with a comfy velvet sofa; it belonged to TakeOff’s founder and CEO, Mack McAllister.
Sabrina made her way to her workstation. She sat next to an intern on one side and her boss, Isabel, on the other. At the eco-crafting magazine, they’d been in cubicles, and Sabrina had initially found the level of closeness in the TakeOff office oppressive—and she still hated the very word workstation, which always made her think of an assembly line. Forget about private phone calls; you could barely send private emails! But now she was used to it, and besides, hardly anyone ever made phone calls here. All of the people at the level above Sabrina were called Heroes—there was an Engineering Hero, a Product Hero, a Sales Hero, and a Biz Dev Hero. Isabel was twenty-six, exactly ten years younger than Sabrina, but she had been at TakeOff for two and a half years, almost as long as the company had been around; she had started as Mack’s assistant and been promoted rapidly.
Neither Isabel nor the intern, who came in three days a week, was there yet. Sabrina got to work before almost anyone else so that she could leave at five, which was practically midafternoon for most people in the office, but that had been a condition of her hiring that she had insisted on: she needed to be home before six so that she could let the nanny leave and eat dinner with her kids. Dan, who worked three floors down from her, had asked for no such concessions and usually didn’t walk in the door before seven or eight.
Sabrina put down her still-unfinished coffee and her bag, took off her jacket, and woke up her computer. She sat and closed her eyes and breathed deeply. She’d been skeptical when Mack brought in the meditation guru, a woman named Carly with impossibly long and shiny dark brown hair parted in the middle who was bicoastal and alluded to her celebrity clientele, but Sabrina had actually found some of Carly’s techniques useful, like just closing your eyes and breathing. “A little moment for your soul to heal,” Carly liked to say in her soothing voice. Sometimes that was all it took.
When she opened her eyes, there was TweetDeck on her screen, already scrolling automatically and furiously. Sabrina’s job was to tweet from the TakeOff account and also to monitor anything being said about the TakeOff app on Twitter. She needed to start off the day with an innocuous tweet to the TakeOff account’s 101,712 followers. She drummed her fingers on her desk and finally came up with
tfw u don’t wanna get out of bed & then u see it’s a perfect fall day
Beneath the tweet she put an animated GIF of a sloth poking its head out from behind a tree. Before she’d started this job, she’d barely known what LOL meant. Now she was entirely conversant in the lingua franca of people a decade younger than she was, which as far as she could tell consisted mostly of emoji, GIFs, and acronyms. When she was sure no one was walking by, she would sneak onto Urban Dictionary to look up new ones; it had taken her a week to figure out that tfw meant “that feel when” and not “too fucking weird,” which, to be honest (or tbh, as her coworkers would say), made a lot more sense. (She didn’t totally understand why tfw wasn’t an abbreviation for the grammatically correct “that feeling when,” but she kept that to herself.) Now and then, one of the acronyms would slip into her texts with her age-appropriate friends, and in response she would usually get back: ????? Dan was particularly scornful whenever she used what he called alphabet soup. “Just speak grown-up English,” he’d said on more than one occasion. “It doesn’t make you cool. It makes you seem like one of those people who just read an article about how to communicate with your teenagers using the new hip slang.”
The TakeOff tweets didn’t have to be specifically related to the app; in fact, Isabel was emphatic that the way to grow the account was through not always tweeting about the app. “Make it have a personality,” she would say, which at first seemed a little ridiculous—It’s an app—but over time, Sabrina came to understand what she meant. No one wanted to engage with a brand unless it felt fun; like a cool, sympathetic, wise friend. And a friend who always had a positive message. It definitely wasn’t rocket science, but Sabrina had to admit that it had been oddly satisfying that on a day she’d been sick and the intern had taken over the account, they had lost 243 followers. On the days she tweeted, they always gained at least a hundred.
By the time Isabel showed up, at ten thirty, Sabrina had retweeted seventeen responses to her weather tweet and was screenshotting them to put on the TakeOff Tumblr. “Hey,” she said as Isabel took off a plaid wool cape and put it casually on the back of her chair.
“Heyyyyy,” Isabel said, smiling. “You will not believe what I got into last night.”
“What did you get into,” Sabrina said, still staring at TweetDeck.
Isabel was still smiling. “You know that guy Andrew Shepard?” Sabrina tried to remember whether Isabel had ever mentioned an Andrew. After concentrating on work all day and then having to deal with her kids, she had very little brain space left for anyone whose name was preceded by that guy.