Love Hacks: Chasing it All

12: Watchgears

12: Watchgears

The next day at work, Vincent Black did the most stereotypical of things: he ignored her. Phoebe went by his office and gave him a significant look, but the glance he returned was vacant, as if he barely knew her. He went on with a meeting he was having. On her way back to her team area, she passed by the virtual reality room and blushed. She went inside to partially replay their interaction from the night before. She saw the headset Mr. Black had worn as he answered the date sim's questions. A mix of virtual reality headgear and models for new prototypes lined a shelf, which she'd grabbed at one point with white knuckles as she listened to his answers. She stared at a stretch of blue-and-white carpet and wondered if she could still smell his cologne lingering on the air. And right there, by that chair with the vines pattern, she'd wanted to hold his head against her chest, enfolding him in her arms until the natural-sunlight LED lights dimmed because the motion sensors could no longer detect them in their stillness. Revisiting the innocent memories of the night before felt like straying into a dream.

She told herself that Vincent was just busy.

But when lunch hour came, Mr. Black went out with several other software engineers and didn't invite her. At Irenicus Enterprises, it was strongly encouraged to work during lunch. To drive this point home, the executive team themselves did not have lunch at their actual workstations or bring their laptops with them to eat. Even the CEO showed everyone that is was okay to enjoy themselves with colleagues for at least a solid hour. The idea was that employees who liked each other would be better teammates than those who just sat typing away at their computers with a sandwich sitting nearby. Phoebe thought this was a great tone-at-the-top that Mr. Black had set. Now she grew angry that someone who was actively ignoring her was also the one who came up with something she quite liked.

"Fine, I'll ignore him too, then," she told herself.

She threw herself into her work with unmitigated zeal. Her team area was right next to the virtual reality room, and it was a large expanse that encompassed three large team-area desks and several dozen puzzle-piece desks that could be moved and reconfigured however the engineers wanted. All of this was surrounded by sound barriers with a holographic, lush forest scene. When you walked amongst it all, it appeared that the palm trees on the barriers swayed in some unfelt breeze.

But the most impressive thing about her team area was the floor. It looked like an ocean, with snakes of light crisscrossing oh-so-blue, Aqua Velva waters. This floor caught the light resplendently, and it always put Phoebe in a good mood to walk over it.

Of course, these decorations were all put in after Mr. Black had consulted with her about her visions of bringing virtual reality more into reality itself. They'd sat with Vicky from the Facilities and Operations department, and she'd quickly come up with the designs and executed them with the contractors she knew and (almost) trusted. While Phoebe harbored nothing but admiration and good feelings towards Vicky, the memory of Mr. Black at those meetings galled her now. He hadn't put in his two cents about what should be done with the space, and when she'd looked to him for approval for it all, he'd merely said, "It's your division, and it'll come out of your operational budget," and smiled.

Phoebe was honest with herself. If she harbored feelings for Vincent, was it so bad? At those same meetings with Vicky, Mr. Black had strained to keep their finances separated even under the same corporation. As he kept emphasizing, she had her own operational budget, and he was not allowed to touch it. At the time, this seemed like a wonderful way to separate their concerns so that the stage could be set for a fair romantic encounter. So should she be so concerned with becoming involved with him?

Three scrum teams reported to her, each one composed of twelve members. A scrum team followed a set of software development practices that reflected this reality: completion is better than perfection. Because the pursuit of the latter often annihilated all hope of the former from ever happening, scrum teams often developed software while in close touch with the software's consumers. This way, the software could quickly change and adapt to what its users actually wanted. What's more, there was a set of agile practices aimed at the idea that it was better to release something you were embarrassed of than to release nothing at all. In fact, Phoebe sometimes intentionally left mistakes in her programs just to get over her own perfectionism so that she could finish them. She purposefully defaced her Mona Lisa's so that she could get something hung up rather than spend months or years on something no one might want anyway.