His dismissive comments couldn’t go unchallenged. I couldn’t help myself. Executive Joe needed to be called out. “Estrogen maniacs? Women stuff? A mature use of words, Joe.”
I scanned Ian’s and Joe’s faces, trying to detect any humanity. “I’d like to stay on the project and see it to completion. I’ve met every internal milestone deadline and earned the trust of the team. I respectfully ask that you keep me on as production lead. Also, if you don’t, I agree with Joe that this could turn into a media nightmare, making you look like an antifemale company.” I didn’t say, Oh, and by the way I would totally sue your asses, which was what I was thinking.
“Fine.” Ian glanced down at his watch. “Joe, we need to send a press statement out ASAP. I’m having a conference call with the board of directors to let them know we’re working on defusing this situation. Oh, and Melody? I asked the IT guys to help you sort your inbox so you don’t see all the garbage and hate mail. We don’t want you to get distracted by all that during crunch time. It’ll get forwarded straight to legal for them to deal with legally and criminally.”
He looked at his watch again. “Since we’re on a tight schedule, we want you to be productive and not spend a single minute sorting through pictures of torsos and hairy balls. Plus, as you said, it would look bad if we replaced you. The risk of crazy female activists beating down our door is a more real threat than some loser teenage asshole trolling you and blowing off steam on some message boards.” Damon, the IT guy, appeared at my office doorway and set up email folders on my computer while the discussions continued. Thank goodness the legal team was handling all these emails.
AN HOUR LATER, the PR team released the Official Statement of Seventeen Studios on our website and emailed it to our entire company:
To our friends in the gaming community:
Unfortunately, a small group of people have been saying awful things online about our company and our games, games we will continue to release because we won’t be bullied into canceling them. They have been harassing one of our female employees, and they have been tarnishing our reputation as gamers with their unacceptable behavior.
Gaming should be a fun experience, both positive and uplifting for everyone, whether you’re a gaming newbie or a veteran. We aren’t trying to quash freedom of speech. We just ask that everyone try to be respectful.
Remember, there is another person on the receiving end of your communications. They’re part of your community.
(And next is where Ian must’ve veered off-script . . .)
You don’t shit where you eat.
Seventeen Studios stands against hate and harassment.
Thank you,
Ian MacKenzie and Melanie Joo
Damn it. He didn’t even get my name right.
Within minutes of sending out the press release, email responses poured in from female employees at our company, nearly twenty total, letting me know they stood by me in solidarity. Knowing I had allies at work supporting me lifted my spirits and helped keep me focused on my work. I wasn’t in this alone.
Because my launch date didn’t magically get pushed out due to the BetaGank incident, I still needed to get a ton of work done that day. I messaged one of the lead developers, who was also one of Asher’s buddies, to see why Asher hadn’t shown up at work yet. He wrote back, Out sick brah, says he’s gonna work from home. Right. He’s “sick.” More like he was too terrified to come into work and deal with the spiraling vortex of racist and sexist shit he’d instigated with his BetaGank leak.
Against Ian’s wishes, I peeked into the “DO NOT READ: HARASSMENT” temporary folder Damon had created in my inbox. The messages directed to this folder would auto-send to legal after five minutes. There were sixty-two new messages in the five-minute harassment repository.
@nastymasta82 Us REAL gamers are sick and tired of you stupid feminists ruining everything. Not everything is sexist. Attention whore
@BigSky22 Feminism has taken over our society and people like you want to punish men for just being men. You want more girls in games? More games should have neh-kid girls characters
@fellasquad It’s pretty clear to me that this Melody person got special treatment just for having a vagina. Affirmative action at its worst. Dumb bitches
@GoBackToIndia Go back to China. Never mind. Just die
Some idiots had sent pictures of other random Asian women (named Melody Joong, Melody Jung, and Melody Joon), mistaking them for me. Yeah, I wasn’t supposed to read those messages during work hours, but shit, I couldn’t help it. That got me worked up, with people calling me a bitch, making fun of my ethnicity, and calling me an attention whore. Me? Had they ever met Jane? They called me stupid, too, which really struck a nerve. Those assholes knew nothing about me. And no one who knew me would ever call me stupid. You know who was stupid? Someone who would blindly pass judgment on another person they didn’t know at all. I was not stupid. I could out-calculus any one of those troll motherfuckers. Was I clumsy? Yes. Awkward? Absolutely. Did I do stupid things sometimes? Um, yeah. But that didn’t make me stupid.
Messages had also escalated in severity: I saw death and sexual assault threats, and hundreds of requests for nude pictures and graphic sexual propositions. My stomach knotted as I read these vile words. How could people make snap judgments about me based on tidbits of information they gleaned from the internet? It was like racial profiling with uninformed stereotyping and armchair psychoanalyzing. This practice always led to misinformed conclusions, and potentially dangerous results.
I wished this was all just a bad dream, but it was very real. My full-body numbness prevented me from ugly crying in my office.
Wild-eyed, jittery publicist Joe slammed my door open just as I finished my email skimming. Sue trailed a few steps behind him. Since that morning he looked like he’d walked into the eye of a tornado and aged five years.
“Hi. Sue and I need you to look over these new rules of engagement as soon as possible, drafted by Ian, our lawyer, and a few members of the board.” He paced around while I read.
Per these new rules, I was not allowed to talk to the media about the Ultimate Apocalypse game (“hereby in this document referred to also as ‘UA’”—ugh) or about the company itself. This included but was not limited to: information about the people, the culture, and the male-female ratio. I couldn’t respond to any of the email or social media harassment; this was being handled by our legal and PR team. Playing any online games was prohibited, in case someone figured out my gamertag. And last, I needed to refrain from any public discussion about these ongoing developments. There was a chance we may need to file criminal charges if this ballooned even bigger, and the fewer people involved, the better.
Joe said, “I am so sorry about everything. We’re trying to figure out how to handle this on the fly. This is uncharted territory. And all these restrictions, the dos and don’ts, are overwhelming. It’s like drinking from a fire hose, I’m sure.”
Not quite accurate. It was more like I was trying to drink from a fire hose that was actually on fire, while spraying out fire.
And then, just as I hit an ultimate low point in my life, Jane texted me.
I booked a wedding dress appointment at six bridal boutiques this Sat. I’ll need you to tell me if I look amazing or not. Then we need to look at shoes. Btw I’m going to start on the Whole 30 diet thing tomorrow. Maybe you should too?
I was, without a doubt now, so clearly and utterly fucked.
And to make my utterly fucked state even more fucked, Nolan, Mr. Worst Timing Ever, stopped by my office just before I was leaving for the day. Today he had on a brown-and-black-checked shirt, not my favorite on him, but still hugged his body nicely. “You doing okay?”
I nodded. Barely okay.
“Um, do you want the bad news, or even worse news?”
Sighing hard, I melted into a blob in my chair. “I don’t care. You pick.”
“Ian imported the graphs you sent him and accidentally broke all the formulas.”
Okay, that was bad, but that wasn’t horrible.
“He also changed some of our retail pricing for the holidays, so some of our assumptions need to be updated and accounted for in the new graphs.”
I nodded slowly. “You mean, the graphs with the broken formulas.”
“Yeah.”
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
I pointed at Asher’s empty chair and beckoned Nolan to bring it over. He sat and wheeled over to me. Here we were again, right next to each other, me breathing in his intoxicating Nolan scent, faintly woodsy with a top note of fancy hotel soap. He leaned over my laptop to pull up Ian’s files from the hard drives, his muscular arms distracting me from all that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. Instead of staring at the line graphs, my gaze traveled down his body, craving for him to touch me again.
A sense of unease swept through me as I remembered Asher, sitting over at his desk, reciting excerpts from that stupid handbook. How smug he looked when he thumbed through the pages, spouting off all the reasons why I couldn’t be thinking about Nolan this way. And Asher had been right: I was a supervisor, and Nolan was an intern.
Jumping to my feet, I paced back and forth. This was getting dangerously close to overstepping boundaries. Companies turned a blind eye to some people breaking the rules, but I wasn’t one of them.