Nerd Girl

      After seven years at Megasoft Software Corporation, one of the most iconic technology companies in the world, I’ve had a lot of experience keeping projects on track. Over the course of my career, I’ve saved trains from skidding off rails, rescued colleagues from drowning, and put out four alarm fires. That’s all figuratively speaking, of course. If there was one thing that I knew I was good at, it was my job.

You’d think all that practice would’ve carried on over to my personal life, but at the ripe age of twenty-nine, I, Julia Hayes, was perpetually stuck on point number four—I couldn’t seem to learn from my mistakes. I think it’s the main reason why, when it came to love, I hadn’t yet been able to reap any rewards. That and I’m a serious control freak.

Being a tad OCD, I have a bad habit of analyzing everything to death. So of course, I’ve tried analyzing this one anomaly in my life. Where I had succeeded in business, I had failed miserably in love. A corporate-driven project was predictable and controllable; risks could be mitigated and mistakes were learned from and hopefully not repeated through post-mortems.

Easy stuff.

Falling in love and getting to my happily ever after? Let’s just say my track record hasn’t been so good.

Unlike my color-coded underwear drawer, when it came to matters of the heart, there was no set of rules to follow. If my relationships veered off track, I couldn’t just increase the budget and extend the deadline. So if a boy broke my heart, I did the only thing I knew I could control. I managed my heartbreak by occupying myself with something I was good at—I focused on my career.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Chocolate cake sobfests work for some people, and I felt just as defeated as anyone did after a failed relationship. But eating sugar and hitting replay on sad Taylor Swift songs about relationships gone astray lead to more misery and ten extra pounds. I didn’t like being in any sort of free fall. Being in a free fall meant losing control. Do you see a theme here?

When my boyfriend of three years, Andrew, confessed to cheating on me and proposed to the other woman, I thought it appropriate to change jobs. I was working a ton of extra hours in an effort to occupy my days, not to mention the evenings, but after three months, I realized overtime wasn’t cutting it anymore. It was time to do something more drastic. I now found myself walking across the Megasoft campus, crossing the street between Building Eighteen and the athletic fields, on my way to a job interview.

I love that MS (this is what we call Megasoft for short in Seattle) is so supportive of employee ambitions and encourage moving about within the company. There were many privileges of being an MS employee, and having access to all the job postings before they were made available to the public was one of them, along with free software and soda.

I strolled along the sidewalk, watching a soccer game that was in progress across the street. I admired the fact that at MS it wasn’t considered out of the norm for people to be playing soccer outside in the middle of a workday. My first interview was scheduled for ten o’clock. I looked at my watch, which read 9:35. I was right on track to arrive early with at least fifteen minutes to spare to mentally prepare myself for what would be about five or six hours of interview grilling.

As I continued my walk, I mentally rehearsed potential interview questions. I really hoped they didn’t ask me vague, puzzle, “gotcha!” questions. I really hate those “gotcha” questions. When I was first hired into MS, I was twenty-two years old and straight out of college. During my first round of interviews, I actually had a lead software developer ask me a question about light bulbs. When it came to MS interviews, asking candidates a question about light bulbs was almost a cliché. If you were in one room with thee light switches and there were three light bulbs in the room next door, which switch went to which bulb? You could only go into the other room once before you provided your answer. Personally, I never understood the point behind these questions, other than intending to make you squirm and feel like an idiot, but some jerk asked one every time. For the record, I got the light bulb question correct.

As I went through the mental drill of reviewing mock answers to classic MS questions like, “How do you deal with ambiguity?” I noticed a soccer ball rolling across the street, heading directly towards me. Without any hesitation, I walked into the middle of the road and reached down for the ball. I was carrying my laptop between my chest and left arm, so I picked up the ball with my right. As I stood up, I heard tires screeching and looked to my left in surprise, only to see a black SUV slamming its breaks. The car had slowed down enough to round the corner, but couldn’t stop fast enough to miss a girl in the middle of the road, and before I knew it, the bumper knocked me down with brute force.