From the desert, to an interview in Los Angeles. It was my birthday and it was a time for my rebirth. At least I subconsciously yearned for it —a state of the inner mind that might not lead to the best decisions nor the best outcomes.

Drove my old Accord, slowly. In the rearview mirrors, the presence of a desert that had instilled its ghost in me.

The desert was past and it hadn't clarified what was I to become.

Mine was a scenic route —as if I was hoping to find something or someone in the way that gave meaning to the journey that life is. Or maybe I was just avoiding tolls and freeways.

When my detour had been stupidly excessive —I remember prospecting on the horizon the features of the Salton Sea and the Joshua Tree NP—, I decided to face whatever the future held.

At that point I was around Juniper Hills. I had passed a strange church, and I thought I had seen someone in monk's habits. Suddenly becoming aware of my chosen route, and curious about the reality of what I witnessed, I retraced my steps and headed back to Valyermo. The strange church was an abbey, but there wasn't anyone there.

I shrugged and kept driving through my unconventional route. After a few desolate campgrounds and a long forest road, I made it to the crest. Serpentine and mostly downhill from then, I finished crossing the San Gabriel mountains, faced the apocalyptic city, and made it to the headquarters of Dangerous Crush in Sunset Boulevard.

The interview had a quite informal tone. These guys had been struck by luck —reaching 2.7 monthly unique visitors a little over one year after they released their first version of the site.

Maybe things have changed now, but that was quite good.

It wasn't a Forbes 500 company with all its bullshit.

Their site had nothing special about it: it was just another free dating site, with ever-changing plans to monetize their services. It wasn't targeted at any specific segment of society; wasn't meaning to help society in any way or form, nor seemed very original. They routinely copied the features from other sites.

They did it well enough, and so, they underwent a certain metamorphosis: from bottom-feeders to sharks. But even their shark entity seemed not to have much of an identity —instead being an amorphous stack of aspirations. A bit like me. Good match!

Nobody in the whole day noticed that I was bringing fresh sweat from the desert, nor that it was my birthday. How would they? That's exactly how I liked it. The most obvious descriptors of that day had to be irrelevant. All this, representative of two distinct feelings I had kept hallucinating: the utter freedom from social norms and the crushing loneliness that had already become a part of my identity.

Gary and Mallory were the main two persons carrying the interview on. They made it easy. They didn't push much into asking why was I leaving academia. Though they were a bit surprised by me applying for such a job —clearly a break in the progression of my résumé.

"I should have removed many of the entries in my résumé" —I thought to myself. After removing what I was chosing to reject then, it would be bare.

They quickly assumed that I had been burnt out. As I showed the most endearing of my facets in the interview, they found themselves willing to justify the perceived risk of me increasing their employee turnover rate. After all, they were in desperate need of someone able to manage the data chaos that such a rapid growth had caused.

Fill the position, quick.

And they really liked my profile as a data analyst. They were a small team. Among the workers they had, only a couple could claim experience in fields like statistics or machine learning.

I was promised several "freedom treats". And I’m not talking about benefits —nor their beer taps on site— but:

To be able to establish goals related to the handling of user data, as long as they were compliant with the law.

To be free to analyze metadata and decide what indicators to add to the —otherwise plain— monthly report that the direction digested.

Freedom to redesign crucial data tables, and submit proposals to redesigning the interfaces with other parts of the system. Those tables were the ones regarding users, profiles, messaging, matches, et cetera. Practically, much of the backend.

Freedom to establish details about the users' match-making algorithm.

The last one was, by far, the most motivating for me. They had wavering plans to sign with a self-proclaimed relationship expert, strike a deal with a self-help messiah, or whatever. Yet, at that moment, I had absolute freedom in designing the match-making algorithm.

Maybe it was the feeling of control over others' lives. Or maybe the allure of making them happier. Whatever it was, it sparkled a forgotten inspiration. It brought back the perception of beauty of data science.

It seemed that working at Dangerous Crush was going to be fun, after all.

Chapter 31: A dangerous crush.