It’s a Saturday and you got woken up at 4 am—you’ve been waking up at random hours, your 8-hour sleep routine pretty much a thing of ancient times now. It sucks, but you’ve made peace with it. This is your new life.
But at least, for a few days, you get to play pretend that whatever happened in the past three weeks did not happen—you’re now lying in bed inside an old shophouse converted into a B&B, surrounded by vintage mini musical instruments and oil paintings, far removed from all the noise and the chaos. Slack, Gmail, PagerDuty—all muted.
Things feel normal and safe, at this time.
Your phone lights up. A WhatsApp notification.
“You going to SF?” your friend asks.
Huh? You wonder. What is she talking about? How did she know you’re traveling—you don’t usually tell a lot of people when you’re traveling, and you know you didn’t tell her. And why did she think it’s SF anyway?
“No,” you reply, eyebrows arching. “I’m in Penang right now. Why the heck am I even going to SF?”
Silence.
“LOL,” you add. Laugh out loud, except that you don’t actually find this funny. Something is wrong, you just don’t know it yet.
She posts a New York Times article without any comment.
“In an email for remote engineers,” the article says, “he says he wants to speak to people on video… but “if possible, I would encourage you to fly to SF to present in person.”
Aw, poor remote engineers, you think, reading through the tweets as though you’re tearing through the pages of yet another tech disaster book—your favorite genre—a la John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood or Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped.
Until it registers in your brain that you, you are one of those remote engineers.
You received the email(s) too—yes, plural, there are multiple of them—and as you go through them, you find yourself going through the stages again. Ah yes, the good ‘ol stages of grief—probably the 100th cycle you’ve gone through over the past three weeks:
Denial. This whole trip, in retrospect, is probably you way of denying.
Anger. You scream into the pillow.
Bargaining. You think: ah, if only I didn’t say Yes… if only I have left earlier. If only. You open Apple Music and start playing Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. “I should have stayed on the farm,” Elton John sings. You wonder if you should have too.
Depression. You start thinking about sleeping it away until your flight on Tuesday.
Acceptance. You glance at the clock—it’s already 8. You remember that you have the best nasi kandar in the country (according to your friend, at least) waiting for you.
And so you walk out of your bedroom, put the best smile you can muster, with your heart repeating, beating:
“This… this is fine.”