Chapter 36: Treadmill.

The training process of my new job was interesting. There wasn't that much to learn about what they had done. The patent chaos rusting great parts of the codebase wasn't even that surprising. Yet the most peculiar characteristic of my job was that no one really knew what I was supposed to do.

But me. Once I ignored whatever code and processes they used and concentrated in the data they had collected, everything flowed as it should.

A lot went into automating the data acquisition and preparation. The data was all there, but in many different pockets. Most pockets, they had forgotten even to look at them. Some obvious things, like some useful data fields in the web server logs from the frontend (obvious ones, like agent and referrers) had been ignored. As if they had assumed that the access metadata was only useful for ads. Serving ads, anyway, was externalized completely. The big company in charge dealt with their own requests and cookies, and gave us some distilled analytics, that Dangerous Crush had used for making beautiful presentations in PowerPoint.

My policy was: get all data! As much as we could in our tiny infrastructure... We'd distill it later, of course, only with the goal of matching those lonely souls.

Once routine imposed its tedium, I got to discover those traits in my coworkers —those I already have complained about. Our team was plagued by egomania, ignorance, arrogance, narcissism, envy, hostility, dishonesty, fatalism, destructiveness, cynicism, negativity. I'll claim the last three for me. Of course, for all those bad qualities, there were dozens of good ones —that I rarely could see or care about, my losers' trifecta standing.

I mostly hung out with Eve, Carl and Chuck. Through chained circles of influence I got to meet some additional friends of those three. Dan, Phil, Marissa... and some other minor characters. All in and around their thirties, nobody was excessively prone to get wasted nor risk much from what they had established their life was. It wasn't a reward vs risk assessment what they were used to make: it was a simple refusal of any risk above a low threshold. In other words, they weren't very open to new experiences, once they were well positioned on the comfort of routine. They could passively wither and die in emptiness before risking more than what was socially acceptable.

That wasn't such a big deal, though. For once it was nice to fall under the spell of steady, dull comfort. I kept hanging out with them, even if they didn't inspire much of value in me —save Eve, of course. It was mostly about dinners and adult conversations. Conversations concerning politics, entertainment, and all those things life gets distracted with when slowly going down the drain.

As I became closer and closer to Eve, she kept showing fascinating qualities. I felt that I could confide in her, but hers was such a blissful aura that never incited me to vent all the toxicity I got inside. She effectively delayed its release. It's interesting how I always automatically reserved the confidant role to cynics and realists.

Within a couple weeks of being roommates, there was a vague truth about Eve that had became increasingly obvious —that one referring to Eve's sexual tendencies. She was a thin, tall brunette who gave no easy clue to her homosexuality. It was only through exposure that I learned about it. Although technically out of the closet, she wasn't particularly eager to proclaim it. I understood that it was mainly because she undertood sexuality as something intimate —and knowledge about it exclusive to people that were very close.

As opposed to many other humans I knew, she never gossiped about sex: not at all because she didn't have a natural conception of it, but because she would consider disrespectful to do so. And in such a way, I agreed completely: I had hated the sexual defamation game that Margo and her guys had played with each other. And Margo was just an example: tastelessly exposing others' sexual intimacy was quite prevalent.

After she verbalized her lesbianism, she had to humor my occasional questions. Sometimes somewhat politically incorrect, others just a funny exposé of my ignorance of the deeper details and terminology from that aspect of her life. She made me feel entitled to ask, to ride on my curiosity. Thanks to her I developed an interest in it —a subject with much more depth than I would have imagined at first.