could (and should) deal with my work backlog and email harassment in the morning, with a clearer head.
The wine, compounded with weeks of sleep deprivation, helped me fall asleep fast, but I didn’t have a restful slumber: I dreamt that all my post office mail had been compromised and flooded with dick pic first class and bulk mail. Restoration Hardware catalogs, Valpak coupon mailers, and voter registration notices, all plastered with penii. Waking up to pee in the middle of the night helped put a stop to my stupid dick pic nightmare. But as the night wore on and I sobered up, it hit me that nothing prevented these terrorizers from just showing up on my doorstep. How bad had this situation become?
Chapter Eleven
A night of off-and-on dozing and a newly formed hangover didn’t put me in the best state of mind to think through what I needed to do next. Who had been leaking proprietary information from inside the company? Who were these assholes who immediately jumped on the hate bandwagon without giving me the benefit of the doubt? And who would go as far as emailing me grotesque porn images, coupled with ignorant commentary disparaging women?
I glanced at the clock on my nightstand. Crap! I needed to be in a status meeting in thirty minutes.
As I untangled myself from my bedsheets, my mom texted. MELODY CALL BACK VERY IMPORTANT1!!!
Three missed calls from her, and two from my dad. My hands shook as I returned their call. “What’s going on? Are you guys all right?” Please, god, let my mom and dad be okay.
My mom shouted, “What is happen with you? Someone call our house in the middle of night and asking for you. He say he is secret admirer or something blah blah and want to talk to you. I told him he has wrong house because no way my Melody have any secret admiring boys. He get very angry and curse at me and then hang up.”
Those trolling assholes had moved on to harassing my parents. “Mom, are you and Dad okay? If you get any more calls like that, please call the police.”
“We be okay. No one usually bother us, so we call you right away. We hope you not ever dating him. That’s why we want you to marry nice Korean boy.”
Deep breath in, and exhale. “Could you guys just turn your ringer down and let the calls go to voice mail? It’s a long story, but a bad person posted some information about me online, and now it’s really blowing up.” I put the call on speakerphone and logged in to my work email.
My dad jumped on the other line. “Melody? Are you famous now?”
I skimmed my emails quickly on my laptop. Three hundred forty-two messages. “Am I famous? Not really. But I am getting a lot of hate mail and fan mail, so I guess I’m more famous than I was just twenty-four hours ago.”
“Okay, call our cellular phone later. We going to IHOP now. They have senior citizen early lunch special. Goodbye!”
I jumped into the shower, lathered and rinsed my hair, loofahed my entire body in ten seconds, and hopped back out, all in under a minute. After patting on powdered foundation and twisting my drippy hair into a clipped bun, I threw on a random assortment of clothing and ran out the door with my laptop bag.
My fifteen-minute meeting alert popped onto my phone screen as I called my Liftr car. I barely had time to think about work with all the shit going on thanks to the BetaGank article.
I got to the office and had only two minutes to spare. Except, there was no meeting, because it had been canceled. Ian, the head of Human Resources, and the publicity director all stood in my office, along with a stuffy corporate guy carrying a briefcase. That’s when I knew this had all officially turned into a nuclear shitstorm.
IAN CLOSED MY door and motioned for me to sit down, even though everyone else remained standing. I put my bag down on my chair and continued to stand along with the others. This wasn’t going to turn into some weird power play where Ian and his cronies would look down at me, literally. No thanks.
Sue, the head of HR, got straight to it. “We have a huge heaping pile of shit on our hands. The PR team got hundreds of negative social media alerts about the Ultimate Apocalypse game this morning. What the