I remember that it began at another Thirsty Thursday, another night in The Shamrock, our usual after work watering hole. I don't remember exactly who was there, but it was probably most of the usual crew. Craig, Boris, and Vik from Dev, Jim from QA, Erica and Mike from Project Management, Tammy and her marketing comrades. It was the usual social set, some singles, some folks who were lonely even if they were with someone. We all gathered at The Shamrock to let off some steam and gripe about the usual array of office politics and divining the mysteries of management.
There was new girl in the lot, young, pale, with long, chestnut hair bound in a tidy and professional ponytail, and possessed with the brightest, most piercing, sapphire eyes that I've ever seen. She was at a corner of the bar with Tammy's clique of marketing and PR flacks, probably a new sales or marketing hire, but I was content to keep my distance and leave curiosity unsatisfied. Devs and marketing rarely speak the same language, and if it was going to be usual banal talk of shoes and TV then I wasn't interested anyway.
As is usual for a Thursday outing, after a couple of rounds, the crowd would dwindle. Vik headed out to drive his mildly buzzed self home to his family in the suburbs. Jim would usually make some Irish goodbye and just disappear. Dogs had to be walked. Errands had to be run. Eventually, it was down to five of us and Mike suggested, "hey, anyone want to get some food? Let's grab our stuff and move on. Jake, you in?"
I had a tendency to beg out at this time. I was dating a girl when I first joined this company, and I would usually duck out to see her, but that relationship ended a couple of months back, and so now I was more open to hanging out. And the interesting girl with sapphire eyes was still around.
"Yeah," I said as I drained my glass. "in."
"All right! Let's go. How about the Bluewater?"
"Ugh," the girl said, "that overpriced yuppie hellhole? If you want seafood, let's go to the Shanty instead."
"New girl wants to slum it!" Mike yelled out as he threw his arm around her. "Only two weeks in and already trying to punch above her weight." Deftly, the girl finished her drink and leaned over to the bar to get out of Mike's reach.
"She's got a point, Mike," I said, "we've gone to the Bluewater a bunch and it's always a clusterfuck with other after work people who have the exact same idea. Let's try a change of place."
"As always, Jake, you keep me in line, old wise one."
I rolled my eyes a bit as we grabbed our bags and headed out. Mike and I had a good working relationship when we were in the office, but after hours, and with a few drinks under his loosening belt, his big mouth could get him in trouble. He was a smart kid and hungry, just turned 30 and nearly my peer even if he was eight years younger. He kept using the 'old wise one' line and I was never quite sure if that was because he was buttering me up or telling me to get out of his way. Still, whether it was a meeting or a booze crawl, he was good at keeping people on point and moving, so he had his uses.
Once outside, the crew followed Mike down to the waterfront and I found myself walking next to the girl.
"You're new here, right?"
"Yeah, I'm Rachel. I joined marketing a couple of weeks ago."
"Welcome aboard. I'm Jake."
"Hi. I think I've heard of you. Professional Services, right?"
"Yup. We're the guys who have to keep your promises."
"Heh, yeah, Tammy was telling me that if we ever got into trouble, you could bail us out, but we had to be careful; because it's like selling our soul to the devil."
"Hmm ... I don't know if I should be insulted or pleased, but I'm glad Tammy learned her lesson."
"Did you really blackmail her for playoff tickets from one of our clients?"
"I prefer to think of it as a useful exchange of talents. My team in ProServ have creative ways of hacking our software to make it do what our clients want, even if it's to meet some outrageous claim that somebody in Marketing mistakenly made, and Tammy has a talent for sweet talking perks out of our clients while schmoozing them. Almost as good as making up what we do to get clients interested."
"So, that was the deal," I continued. "We cobble together some crazy hack for her in exchange for playoff tickets, or we let her hang in the wind and confess to a sales team that she actually doesn't know what she's talking about. I thought it a fair exchange, and a useful cautionary tale. Don't make up outrageous shit about us, or I'll make your life interesting."
"Warning received."
"So, Rachel, what do you do for our illustrious employer?"
"To be honest, I'm not quite sure. My dad plays golf with Levi, one of the founders, and hooked me up with a face-to-face with Chris, the Marketing Director. He didn't have a position in mind, but I think he liked that I did a lot of social stuff and data-driven analysis at my last place, so he's sort of making up a position for me."
I'll bet. I thought that to myself. I've been at this company long enough to know what our hiring style was. For certain positions, it was all about competence and connections, and not necessarily in that order. The founders were serial entrepreneurs, having founded a string of startups, some successful and some less so; but always selling their companies early enough that any failures could be blamed on whoever took over after they left. They knew a lot of techies in the city and hired their favorites, so the fact that Rachel got in through a connection was not a surprise, nor was the fact that someone like her would wind up just getting a job woven out of whole cloth. The founders, Levi and Erich, liked taking chances on bright young things, especially ones that were pretty.
"so analyst/viral dark magic, eh? Ah, well, don't sweat the lack of definition. You're in good company. It's part of the startup life. Jobs here tend to be a freeform, and if you're good you'll find your niche."
"And if I'm not so good?"
"Then you'll be thrown to the wolves."
A more naive youth would've probably quailed at that, but to her credit, Rachel just arced her eyebrow at me and smirked. Good girl. I chuckled and looked back at her.
"Oh, yeah, you'll do just fine here. Welcome aboard."
The rest of that evening was fine. The Shanty was a simple takeout shack near the waterfront, with a bunch of benches nearby so you could watch boats sail in as you munched on your fish and chips. I don't remember much else, though I recall that Rachel held her own amongst us, and quickly cemented her own place in the Thirsty Thursday usual crew.
It's probably worth mentioning that, like many companies, we had our share of co-worker hookups. Sometimes we'd see a couple of colleagues cozying up to each other and then leaving the Shamrock together. It would warrant a bit of good natured teasing and knowing winks; but it wasn't something that I indulged in. Don't shit where you eat. Stay professional. Don't blur office and home. Treat all of your coworkers as people, not half of them as sex objects.
All the same, Rachel and I did not interact much in the day-to-day. Marketing was in a different part of the building, and there weren't a lot of reasons for our teams to work together. Usually we'd just say to hi to each other as we passed by in the corridors on our way to or from meetings. Then, for a while, she stopped showing up to the Thursdays.
I asked Mike, and he chuckled and said, "Tammy and Wondergirl got sent off on an Eastern seaboard schmooze trip. Seems like Erich and Levi's next big idea to build an audience is to send marketing and sales off to different cities to literally force people to install our app. Like tupperware parties. I swear sometimes it's like we're still doing business in the 1960s."
Tammy and Rachel were gone for two months, and got back on a Tuesday. I knew because suddenly a few of us got an email from Rachel with the subject, "Emergency Thirstiness: Shamrock, 6pm, help me murder a couple of bottles of wine (EOFuckingM)."
