(I began to dabble with writing in my mid-20s. After a few rejected pieces, this became my first published piece in White Crow, a little magazine in Michigan. I was 28 and I'd just joined a start-up in 1996, my fifth year in Silicon Valley. I'd already acquired an ironic detachment from my career that was to stay, but I think here I also played with an authorial style that had impressed me. :-) A year or so after it appeared, I asked the editor to remove it from their website, lest it impact my future employment prospects. Well, here it is again. —Oct 2020)

All beverages at my new office are on the house, including Calistoga sparkling mineral water. Every employee gets a blue coffee mug, a purple Polo shirt and a cheap leather jacket, each with a prominent company logo. Next to me is a hyperactive, noisy thirty-something brat. He uses four letter words generously, followed by a polite, 'Paardoan my French'. I have a large corner cube, next to the emergency exit. There's something reassuring about all exits. The knowledge that one is next to me is a small joy.

The executives look busy and important. Maybe, that's why they are executives. One must look the part one plays. They emerge from behind closed doors and talk to the rest about fun and excitement. All day I hear phrases like 'customer base', 'selling point', 'user feedback', 'sales cycle', 'major accounts'. The CEO is fond of saying, ‘How you doin’ big guy?’ I reply, ‘keepin’ busy’. ‘Terrrrifick, buddy,’ he says in his British accent. There's numbing comfort in such talk.

In our first meeting two weeks ago, my boss enthusiastically said that he believes in 'over-communication'. It sounded nice but now I have my doubts. With extra glee, he told me about the vacation he'd just returned from. A hill resort near Calgary — gorgeous nature complete with horse riding, gliding, white-water rafting and more. He’s originally from Noo Yawk Citee. He loves his car phone and often calls me just to say that the traffic is heavy or that he is five minutes away from work (I appreciate the warning). The first three days, he kept saying that he was really glad I joined and that he had big plans for me. I was almost worried.

Of the twenty-five employees, only two are women. One has Chinese-Pakistani heritage and wears translucent tops with bras of contrasting color. She minds the front desk and manages to remain cheerful all day. The other does telemarketing and recently married a 'non-white boy’ in Vegas. I had lunch with one of our two salesmen. He wore an ornate tie with a Native American motif, had wine with Vietnamese food, expressed love for his new four-wheel drive and narrated customer experiences using evocative phrases like, ‘when the rubber meets the road’, ‘I start shitting bricks’, ‘mostly on the back burner’ and ‘occasionally, I hit the jackpot’. He also loves Paris.

On a good morning, it takes twenty-five minutes on 101 South to get to work. Often, stuck in traffic and out of boredom, I watch people around me in their aerodynamic boxes: staid men and women tuned on FM radio and private worries. Office vans advertising ‘Shotgun Delivery,’ ‘Mary’s Muffins,’ ‘A-1 Funerals,’ ‘All My Sons Moving,’ and ‘Egg-roll Fantasies’ weave in and out of my lane. Billboards along the freeway speak of mice and men. ‘Buy all your drives from us,’ ‘our memory is the cheapest in the world,’ ‘let us manage the web you’re in’. Almost always, the commute seems farther than it is from home.

On the opposite side from me are the engineers, mostly decent career-conscious boys with their fair share of postmodern quirks and whimsies. Funky posters and Dilbert cartoons pinned outside cubes. An obsessive juggler, a swearing, pig-tailed tattooed biker. One worries about his daily fix of rice and sambhar, another relies on mysterious three-letter acronyms (TLAs) for communication and often uses words like awesome, groovy, dude, totally, sucks. I noticed a table tennis table folded in a corner and soon thereafter, my hyperactive neighbor sent out an email announcing an internal tournament, cheekily adding, ‘I bet this will help build morale and camaraderie on the road to a successful IPO, right fells?’

Desks with framed studio portraits of family members. Portable music systems with CDs from Beach Boys, Talking Heads, Pumpin’ Pistons, Nasty Jackals and other techno-funk besides boxes proclaiming Space Wars and King-Kong bonanzas in 3-D. In one VP’s office, the terrified character from Munch’s ‘The Scream’ hangs as a cuddly inflatable doll, a company logo inscribed on its technicolor brow. 'Nuke the gay whales for Jesus,' cries a bumper sticker on an engineer’s convertible Camaro. Black humor, I gather. Here, too, abstract skills routinely contribute to concrete self-worth.

Over lunch, talk hovers around personal taste for food and cars, weather, new comedies and thrillers, software, sports, sitcoms, sound systems, company politics, concerts, Emmy awards. My minimal participation is awkward at times but I think they're accepting me in spite of my reticence. Yes, I'm assimilating.

More writing by Namit Arora?