“I’m Asher—I’m an assistant producer who worked my way up through QA. Who are you?” He had to be a foot taller than me and definitely used his height to intimidate.
Neither of us feigned any excitement about being office roomies. Within the first few seconds together in the same room, we knew instantly that we despised each other. Insta-hate, for both of us. His massive presence would suck up most of my available oxygen with his 230-pound body. And he’d jack up the office temperature with his substantial amount of body heat. This did not bode well for me.
“I’m Melody. The person who had this office first. The person whose name is on the door. The person whose shit you moved around without permission.”
He laughed and held his hands up, like he was simultaneously surrendering and pushing away my crazy. “Look, I don’t want to start anything. Ian told me yesterday he’d get me an office, and this morning he sprang the news that I’d be sharing it with some new chick—uhhhh—person, and that I should move my stuff here today. I had high hopes.”
Ian didn’t say a word about any of this to me, though. Bastard.
Asher asked, “Are you an artist or something?”
Nearly all the women I’d met at my company worked in marketing, in HR, or in the art department. I couldn’t fault him for assuming that.
“No, I’m in production, too. I used to be a copywriter at an ad agency. I managed a creative and production team to develop a few game apps and also did a lot of localization stuff . . . now I’m here.”
Asher said flatly, “Huh. I’ve never heard of someone getting into game production with your background. You’ve never actually worked in the industry.” He pressed his lips together and stared at me.
“Well, it’s hard to break into gaming if one of the prerequisites is already having game experience under your belt. How do you get gaming experience if no one will let you get a job in the first place?” Game companies complained all the time about needing more women in the industry, but at the same time, the job requirements precluded women from actually being able to get those positions. At my first company happy hour last week (Booze Day Tuesday!), one of the women in recruiting explained to me that upper management white dudes tended to hire other like-minded white dudes. And since women didn’t fit in the white dude demographic, well, they had trouble finding women for key positions here.
Asher shrugged and went back to rapid-fire typing. Maybe, just maybe, Asher wouldn’t be so bad after all. He’d been on the testing team and had clearly been at the company a long time given the massive number of Seventeen Studios collectibles he had amassed. Maybe he could help me. Maybe we could help each other.
The clicking of the keyboard stopped. He asked, “Wait, are you that girl who flooded the QA team with fluorescent lights a few weeks ago? All those testers were so fucking pissed.”
Oh my god. How’d he know?
“Yeah, I did that,” I said coolly.
Asher tossed his head back and belly laughed. “That was pretty fucking embarrassing. Almost as bad as that anonymous idiot who tripped over the power cord in the war room this morning. Did you hear about that?” That idiot he referred to was also me, but I had escaped without anyone seeing my face.
Tripping on the main power supply in our war room where we tracked all online game activity took down our monitoring system. Because of the blackout, our ops guys didn’t see there was a problem with our game servers, which pissed off millions of players worldwide when the network went down for a few minutes. I shouldn’t have even been there, snooping around in the dark, but the door was propped open with a magazine and curiosity got the best of me.
Neither of us had anything more to say. I went back to reading email, he went back to his machine-gun typing. As minutes ticked by, Asher’s office coexistence became suffocating, quite literally. Our office had poor air circulation and the one air vent was on top of him, blowing Asher-diffused, unshowered air into our small room. Looking up from my laptop and seeing his smug face was punishment that was too much for anyone. I needed coffee breaks. Lots of them.
THE LINE FOR coffee in the kitchen was ten people deep.