Glimpses of a Latina Woman Working in Tech in NYC
By: Lisa Martens
Tags: Tech, Humor, Fiction, Short Story, Book Excerpts

Glimpses of a Latina Woman Working in Tech in NYC

Excerpts from my novel, Trust & Safety.

Free booze. Glass ceiling. Photo by Michael Discenza on Unsplash

Daria sucked her teeth and searched for the following keywords:

Dealbreaker

Deal breaker

Opposites

Five

Kim, a product manger, had a 23-year-old intern named Kevin over the summer. Kevin was full of energy and ready to reinvent online dating. He had unlined skin and large teeth. Daria thought he was drawn with a ruler instead of born. He was symmetrical, beautiful, with straight eyelashes like a doll.

Kevin was getting his PhD in something called “Information Studies.” His job had been, as far as Daria could tell, thinking up experiments that would make her job a living hell.

“We can do some kind of experiment where we connect people with their deal breakers.”

“What?”

“Yeah, like an ‘opposites attract’ kind of thing. We have five deal breaker questions, and we take the two people feel most strongly about, and link them with people who gave the response they don’t want.”

“Why would we…do that?”

“Because, you know, sometimes people think they want something, but they’re really fine without it. So many of these people say they want someone with this color hair, or this weight, or who doesn’t smoke, or is vegan, or whatever. But if you meet someone in real life and you click, those things won’t really matter. So we’ll run this experiment. . .”

They ran the experiment. It did horribly, and incoming emails went up about four percent. The experiment was then killed for all but two percent of users, who occasionally wrote in to ask why they kept getting matched with kinky sex fiends when they had explicitly requested an abstinent partner.

What is pup play?! Why are you matching me with sexual deviants and perverts?

So now, at the start of every day, Daria searched for those keywords for complaints and came up with between five and ten questions from members who were still being subjected to the experiment. The only real solution was to create a new account and hope that new account wouldn’t be a part of the two percent. Daria did this by manually deleting their original accounts and copying all the content into a new one. This was the text Daria sent out:

Hello,

Sorry for the confusion here. We are running an experiment to match folks up with people who are dissimilar. It’s an ‘opposites attract’ kind of thing! If you do not want to be a part of this experiment, let me know and I’ll create a new account for you.

Kevin forgot about that experiment and moved on to other things, but two percent of all members were still impacted in some way. There was even a bug where, if deal breaker questions were not answered, they would just repeat forever.

After the failure of the “opposites attract” experiment, Kevin had another idea. He was going to begin playing a kind of roulette with the ZIP codes, so people with a ZIP code with a lower income would be matched with higher incomes. That experiment, like the one before it, was mostly scrapped, but remnants stuck to the site, and every so often someone would write in about it. Daria had a saved search for that issue, too.

Kevin stayed for two months and ran four experiments like this, all of which did poorly for “interesting” reasons, and all of which stuck around in strange forms and caused members to write in confused and frustrated.

In Kevin’s goodbye email, he explained how the data he acquired was invaluable to his PhD and that maybe it would be compiled in a report one day. Wouldn’t that be funny? Daria had shaken her head when she deleted it.