Uncanny Valley: A Memoir

Wiener attends a lavish company Christmas party and indulges absently in the dancing and socializing until she finds Ian back at the table, savoring his meal. Neither she nor her coworkers had stopped to eat: “I had slipped so easily into a smug sense of belonging. […] I hadn’t even tasted the food” (119). A few weeks later, Wiener reluctantly attends the company ski trip, uncomfortable with the idea of weekending with her coworkers, especially the CEO. She worries quietly about sleeping over with a team member of hers who had groped her in a cab a few weeks before. Most of the trip passes uneventfully, with plenty of rest, play, and easy camaraderie, until the CEO interrupts a drinking session to start an exercise in which the engineers must do the work of the Solutions team. The engineers struggle with the work, which leads to good-natured joking and “a reversal of the power structure” (123). It occurs to Wiener later that the exercise also allowed the CEO to emphasize how expendable the non-technical employees were—that their work could be done drunk.