Lived Through This

Here’s What It Was Really Like to Work at a Women’s Website

I felt nothing. So I headed to my desk for another busy day of browsing online sales and waiting to die.

Photo: Emma Matthews Digital Content Production via Unsplash

I was running two hours late to work on the day I figured out I was really, truly, finally about to get fired. The whole “two hours late” thing wasn’t, like, an eerie portent of doom or anything. I had been pushing my start time back later and later for months until I was here: waking up at 9:30 for a job that started at 9, then finally swanning into the office at 11, with big black sunglasses and a giant takeout coffee, like I was a glamorous drug addict rock star instead of a writer employed to churn out articles like “If You’re Such a Big Feminist, Why Don’t You Fart in Public?” By that point in my career as a blogger, my morning posturing was the only part of the job that I really enjoyed.

Usually, the building’s lobby was jam-packed every hour of every day with various bright, hopeful young persons clutching various bright, hopeful $14 deli salads. Every floor of our office building was filled with vaguely hip, youth-oriented businesses, so not everyone was headed to labor with me in the “women’s issues” gulag on 12. Sometimes the young salad-toters would get off at eight…