Open Source Affair

The hotel in San Diego had a smell like sunscreen and carpet cleaner, and the front desk guy kept calling me "ma'am" like I was somebody's mother. I'm Lesley, I'm twenty-four, and I teach coding at a startup in Oakland. My husband Charles is twenty-eight, and we got married last year after knowing each other since college. This was my first real work conference and I was going to squeeze every drop out of it.

I dropped my bag in the room, went straight out to the balcony, and took a picture of the ocean. Then I texted it to Charles with the caption "wish you were here, except not really, this wifi is amazing."

He texted back a picture of our cat sitting in an empty cereal box.

"Great, he's thriving without me," I said to nobody. The balcony had two plastic chairs and I put my feet up on one and just breathed for a minute. The waves did that thing where they sound like traffic until you stop waiting for them to stop.

Then my phone buzzed again. Not Charles. It was the group chat, the one for the instructors, which is supposed to be for scheduling questions and pictures of snacks. Darcy had pasted in a screenshot with no comment. Just a screenshot.

It was a headcount plan. Internal looking, spreadsheet style, names and titles and dollar figures. My name was on it, and next to my name it said "phase out Q3, backfill with contract instructor."

I read it four times. The ocean kept going behind me like it hadn't heard anything.

"Backfill with contract instructor," I said out loud. "Cool. Great. Love that for me."

Charles texted "how's the beach" and I typed "fine" and put the phone face down. I did not want to have that conversation from a balcony. Some things you want to do sitting down, with a drink, after you've stopped wanting to throw your phone into the Pacific.

So I went down to the bar.

The bar was half full of conference people with lanyards. I still had mine on, the blue one, the instructor track. I ordered a margarita and put my phone on the bar and stared at it like it owed me money.

"Is that the list?"

I looked up. Zeke was standing there with a beer and that face he makes when he's doing math in his head. He's twenty-nine, he's one of our software engineers, and I've known him six months, since the week I got hired. He's tall and he wears the same three shirts on rotation and he's easy to talk to, which I had noticed before but never done anything about, because, you know. Married.

"You've seen it?" I said.

"Darcy sent it to the whole engineering channel about twenty minutes ago. Then she deleted it. Then she sent it again with a shrug emoji." He sat down next to me. "Are you okay?"

"No. I'm getting fired in Q3 apparently!"

"That's a spreadsheet. It's not a decision."

"It has dollar figures, Zeke."

"It has dollar figures," he agreed. "Okay. Drink your margarita and let's think. Who did you report to before the reorg?"

"Eveline. Eveline went to the Denver office in March."

"Right. And now?"

"Nominally Sierra. Actually nobody. I set my own curriculum and nobody checks it and I always thought that was freedom."

"And the spreadsheet thinks it's a cost center," he said. "That's the whole play. You're not being fired for doing anything wrong. You're invisible."

"That is somehow worse."

"It's fixable. Invisible is fixable. Visible is what you want." He pulled a napkin over and borrowed my pen. He drew a box with lines coming off it. "The conference. You're here for three days. Sierra is here too, I saw her name on the attendee list. Go to her talk, ask a real question, don't be weird about it. Then tomorrow you pitch her the thing you've been sitting on."

"What thing?"

"The beginner track rewrite. You complain about it every week. You have opinions. You've told me them at length over lunch."

"Those are complaints, not a pitch."

"Those are the same thing with a slide deck on top. And you've got data, right? Completion rates?"

"I have all the data. I have a folder."

"Then you have a job. You make yourself the person who owns beginner onboarding, publicly, this week, before they finish thinking about the spreadsheet."

I looked at the napkin. It was a dumb little diagram and it made more sense than the spreadsheet did.

"Why are you helping me?" I asked. "You're an engineer. My department's problems are not your lanyard color."

"Because you're good at your job and the spreadsheet is wrong," he said, and then he looked at his beer. "Also I like talking to you. Those are two separate reasons and I'm not ranking them."

"Hm," I said, which was a very cool and collected response, I thought.

We got a second round. We got food, these little tacos that were mostly cabbage. We filled three napkins. By ten the bar had thinned out and my handwriting was going sideways and I said we should probably stop before I signed something.

"I've got my laptop upstairs," I said. "I should pull that folder together tonight while I'm still mad. Mad is good for slide decks."

"I can help. If that's. I mean, if you want a second pair of eyes."

"Yeah, come on. You can carry the napkins, they're evidence now."

So we went up to my room. It felt casual, and it mostly did, we were both still in work mode, laptops open on the bed, the room's one sad armchair holding our taco wrappers. He pulled the folder apart and rebuilt it and argued with me about the order of slides.

"Put the completion data first," he said. "Numbers before words. Sierra's an engineer at heart even in a manager costume."

"Words then numbers. She's been in management for two years, she reads like a manager now."

"Numbers."

"Words."

"Fine, we do words then numbers and you open with the one number anyway. Compromise. Nobody dies."

At some point it got to midnight and we were both lying on our stomachs on the bed with our shoes off, and the slide deck was actually good. Like, good. I looked at it and felt something I hadn't felt since Eveline left, which was that maybe I was not a line item.

"Okay," I said. "This is the thing. This is the thing I send her."

"This is the thing you present to her, in person, tomorrow, right after your own talk. Sending is for cowards."

"You're bossy for a guy in a shirt I've seen three times."

"It's my good rotation shirt."

We laughed at that for longer than it deserved, because it was midnight and we were tired. Then we closed the laptops and there was that pause, the one where the work is done and the room is quiet and you both know the night is over but neither of you moves first.

He sat up on the edge of the bed. "I should go."

"Yeah."

He stood up, and then he turned around, and he did that face again, the math face, except this time it didn't look like math.

"Lesley," he said. "Can I kiss you?"

My brain did the spreadsheet thing, names and titles and dollar figures. My name. My marriage. My husband in Oakland feeding a cat cereal.

And then my mouth went ahead without filing anything.

"Yes," I said.

He leaned down and kissed me, soft, just his mouth on mine, one hand resting on the bed like he was keeping his balance on purpose. It lasted maybe five seconds. Then he pulled back and looked at me like he was waiting for the error message.

"Okay," he said, a little breathless. "Okay. Goodnight, Lesley."

"Goodnight, Zeke."

The door clicked shut behind him and I lay back on the bed with my hand over my mouth like a person in a movie. The ocean kept going. My phone had a text from Charles: "get some sleep, you'll crush it."

I typed back "yeah. You too," and did not sleep for a long time.

The next morning we both skipped the keynote. Zeke texted me at seven forty: "skip the talking head, work the deck? lobby, 8, coffee." I sat on the edge of the bed and typed yes before my brain could file an objection. Then I showered and put on the blazer and told myself it was about the presentation. It was maybe sixty percent about the presentation.

He was at a lobby table with two coffees and the napkins, flattened out under his laptop like old case files. "Evidence," he said when I sat down. "I archived them."

"You archived napkins."

"Chain of custody matters." He slid a coffee over. "Slides one through four are done. Five is your problem."

Five was the ask, the slide where I propose myself as the owner of beginner onboarding. I wrote three bad versions of it while he watched over my shoulder, close enough that I could feel warmth off his arm. On the fourth version he reached past me to point at a line, and his hand landed on mine on the trackpad and just stayed there a second too long to be an accident.

"Sorry," he said, not moving it yet. "Habit. Pair programming. You point, you don't grab the wheel."

"It's fine," I said. My hand was doing a great job of pretending to be a normal hand. "Point away."

He pointed. I fixed the line. Neither of us mentioned the hand and both of us knew we had mentioned it.

By nine the deck was done and there was nothing left to work on, which was a problem, because neither of