Shame Part 3.5

The road to Google is paved with good intentions (and a bad GPA...)

But wait, are you new here? Let’s play catch-up on the Shame Series:

When we last left our anti-hero (yours truly), she was deep in the trenches of early motherhood and the “mommy blogging” golden age. But to understand how we got there, you have to rewind to Part 1, where a 21-year-old (still yours truly) fled the Bay Area after accidentally gossiping about an HR Director’s affair... to the HR Director. (Rookie move.)

She escaped to Reno (Part 1.5), where she excelled at selling ads for the “Gazette Urinal” but was miserable inside. Naturally, she pivoted to …wedding planning (Part 2), a venture that ended in tears at a bridal fair when a florist accused her of taking credit for the florist’s designs—triggering a massive flare-up of Imposter Syndrome.

Most recently in Part 3, your favorite anti-hero sought validation in the blogosphere, projecting a “best friendship” onto a more famous blogger, let’s call her Josephine. When Josephine had the audacity to have a life outside of yours truly, she was issued a highly dramatic email expressing disappointment and effectively torching that relationship, too.

And that brings us to today: absolutely exhausted and ready to pack up the U-Haul…

As fun as it was building community online, I began to feel that my day-to-day life in Reno required actual flesh-and-blood humans to build community with. So, when my daughter reached the adorable (read: terrible) twos, I started campaigning for a move.

I gave my husband two choices: we could move back to the Bay Area to be closer to our entire mishpuha (read: incentivized babysitters), or we could move somewhere with an “intentional living community” (which is a fancy way of saying a commune...Yes, bubelahs, I was willing to live in a questionable 1970s hippie heaven if it meant I no longer had to perform tedious childcare duties in a vacuum.)

Wisely, we chose the Bay Area.

Before we even had time to unpack, I set to lobbying for a return to the workforce (a decision that I would later have to unpack…in therapy, lots and lots of therapy.) Armed with an MBA (the point of which felt immediately outdated in a post-2008 financial collapse world) and my modest success as a “mommy blogger,” I dipped my toe back into the world of work outside the home. (Not to diminish the work done INSIDE the home, which, as a mommy blogger, I was HIGHLY sensitive to.)

I found my first role advising a duo of “dad founders” building a service to help busy parents find fun activities (if they got tired of going to the local playground, I guess). They hired me for my knowledge of their target market and my cultivated network of “mommy influencers.”

Was working for male founders exactly like every horror story you’ve read?

Well, no.

They didn’t hold meetings at the urinals or force me to talk about NASCAR or anything.

But they DID have the adorable habit of ignoring all of my (and the other women on the team’s) suggestions, only to say… attend a conference where a dude would suggest the exact same thing we ladies did three days ago. They would return praising their new guru’s brilliant tactics while my eyes rolled all the way back in my head.

However, credit where credit is due: these dad founders had created a robust content machine supplying parents with a plethora of appropriate, local activities. This cool local content pipeline got the attention of another startup—one nesting inside of Google (yes, THE Google)—called Niantic Labs. They were working on (among other things) an app called Field Trip designed to alert you to cool things happening around you.

As fate would have it, a childhood acquaintance of mine was working on the Field Trip team and contacted me to arrange supplying our startup’s parenting activities content to their cool things around you discovery platform. To butter us all up, my childhood buddy gave us a tour of the San Francisco Google office.

Walking through those halls, seeing the free snacks and the palpable aura of “we are changing the world,” the wheels in my brain immediately began spinning. What if...

It wasn’t just that my current bosses treated my ideas like background noise. It was that I was desperate for validation. I wanted the kind of validation you can’t get from a startup with a shaky revenue model. I wanted the prestige. I convinced myself that if I could just land a job at Google, I would have finally MADE IT. My imposter syndrome would evaporate! My family would finally stop asking me what that silly little MBA was for!

So, when a community and social media manager position was posted internally for the very app I had just connected the dad founders with (Field Trip), I begged my contact on the inside (yes, that same childhood acquaintance) to sneakily add my resume to the pile.

She was hesitant. She didn’t think it was necessarily a good idea; she didn’t think I was “ready” for that kind of corporate environment. She tried to let me down gently. So, naturally, I played the only card I had left: The Soviet Guilt Card.

I laid a low-key guilt trip on her, reminding her that “us women from the Former Soviet Union should probably stick together.” After all, her husband was literally from my obscure hometown of Khmelnitsky—a small city in Ukraine, a country that most people were years away from being able to identify on a map. (Shout out to Putin for putting us on the map… by trying to wipe us off of it.)

She reluctantly acquiesced.

And what do you know? I made it from the slush pile to the in-person interview round! Or rather interVIEWS round - it was a marathon of four interviews in one day, and I prepped for it like my life depended on it. I created a full slide deck on how I saw the role and the product evolving. I was ready to dazzle. But I was also terrified of two things:

1. The Lunch Interview: What kind of sadist schedules an interview during a meal? I am not what you would call a “dainty” eater. What should I have? A lady like salad or an I-can-handle-it burger? As it turned out, my anxiety was the main course.

2. The John Hanke Interview: The man who basically invented Google Earth (the thing that was used to create Google Maps!.) was the lead of Niantic. I had heard the lore: he was brilliant (duh), eccentric (double duh), and tough (dun dun dun dun!)

The day of the interview, I crushed the first few rounds. I transitioned my interviewers smoothly from their pre-scripted questions to my pre-prepared slides. I was buzzing. I felt powerful.

Then came the meeting with John Hanke.

I sat down across from him, ready to discuss community strategy, user engagement, and the future of augmented reality.

He looked at me and asked his first question: “What was your GPA?”

I blinked. “My… GPA? In grad school?”

“No,” he said, his face unreadable. “Your college GPA. It’s not listed here.”

I bristled. How could this possibly matter? I was almost a decade out of college. I had earned a graduate degree since then. I had birthed a human child!

My face flushed. “I think it was a 3.37,” I mumbled.

“Hmm…” he responded.

It was a “Hmm” that seemed to say, Why are you even sitting across from me? What do these recruiters do all day if this is the drek they bring me?

I sat there staring at the linoleum floor, the earlier buzz of confidence draining right out of me, replaced by a rising tide of hot…. prickly… anger.

I got pissed. Really effing ticked off. The absurdity of it! If a 4.0 was a prerequisite for the role, why waste the great John Hanke’s time? And, come to think of it, why waste mine?

I thought about my college years. Ok, I didn’t spend them rowing crew or discussing philosophy on the quad. I spent them working. I understood firsthand what the value of a dollar was because, unlike some trust fund nepo baby, I paid for college myself.

Which was what came out of my mouth a moment later.

Filtered a bit, thank goodness. What I think I actually said was “Maybe if I hadn’t worked two jobs* in college, my grades would have been better!”

Crap. That was stupid to an epic degree.

I braced myself. I expected him to show me the door. I expected the “Thank you for your time” speech.

Instead, his entire demeanor shifted. He leaned in.

“Oh” he said, “Tell me more.”

And just like that, I wasn’t the applicant with the lackluster GPA. I was the scrappy go-getter. The hustle-hard-er candidate.

Bubelahs, I got the job.

I had made it. I was a Googler. Well, technically a contractor at Google, but who’s checking those red badges of shame except…well..everyone?).

I had entered the promised land. Surely, now that I was inside the shiny glass walls, the shame and anxiety would stay outside.

Right?

Yeah right.

(To be continued...)

*The jobs, for the record, were: 1) Annual fund student caller -convincing alums to part with their hard-earned money for the chancellor’s “discretionary fund”, 2) Resident Advisor -convincing freshmen they DIDN’T want to sneak kegs into the dorms, especially not by that fence near the pool, and 3) Hillel program coordinator- convincing campus Jews to engage in some low-key Jewish programming in exchange for free bagels—obviously when there’s free food involved the job is a cake walk.