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The Day the Aliens Came
It was only a matter of time.
Like many potential crises, I didn’t know too much about it initially because I was too lost in my own thoughts and issues both genuine and perceived to care about the world at large.
I had this tendency to get so freaked out about the work I did and how poorly I sometimes felt I was at doing it that it would quickly become all I could concentrate on or dwell on. I’d get into these spirals that made me question everything. And when you’re on a conference call engaging with unhappy clients the rest of the world kind of seems not to exist, especially with these people in particular who were definitely no joke — not the kind of people you zoned out on while talking with to fire up your web browser and see what was what out there in the zeitgeist. They kind of held your immediate vocational future in their hands, and they knew it and acted like it.
Also, I had been screen-sharing — so I had all my notifications turned off. All of them. Every single one.
(You learn early in your so-called career to ensure you do this when something nearly catastrophic happens, like, for example, when one of your colleagues sends you a Slack message that says, “Amelia can suck a big ole’ cock, is what Amelia can do, the fucking hack” when you’re presenting to, of course, Amelia. The sole reason it…
