Long Days Leave No Trace (Part II)
(1)
My day begins like this: at 5:25 in the morning the alarm jolts me awake. After a few flails to make it shut up, I cling to those last few minutes in bed. When it rings again ten minutes later, there is no room for hesitation — I have fifteen minutes to complete the following sequence: get up, use the toilet, wash up, shower, get dressed, stuff the MacBook Pro back into my backpack, go downstairs, put on my shoes, grab a bottle of Soylent, descend one more floor to the garage, and drive to Sunnyvale to catch the 6:13 train. If any one action takes longer than its historical average, I’m in deep trouble: it means either ignoring the 35–40 mph speed limit and speeding the whole way, or sprinting from my parking spot all the way to the platform.
From home to the Sunnyvale Caltrain station is about 4.2 miles with thirteen traffic lights; on a good day I can make it in eight minutes. But the platform for the 6:13 to San Francisco is on the far side of the parking lot, and on the near side sits the 6:10 to San Jose. If I can’t get across the grade crossing before that train arrives, I won’t make mine. So I have to be parked by 6:08.
Every day I board through the same door and sit in the same seat of the same car. Clearly the vast majority of people share the same habit. On Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, a Mexican lady sleeps across from me, her purse carelessly dropped at her feet, sprawled across the table in deep slumber. Days with her are a bit tricky, because a small table barely fits one sleeping head and one open laptop, and I have to be careful not to crowd my computer against her. On Wednesdays and Fridays it’s a Mexican man instead — too stout to do anything but lean diagonally against the window and snore, which actually works in my favor: the whole table is mine. Occasionally someone else sits across from me, or I lose my regular seat altogether — but those are low-probability events, like the occasional bug in the Matrix.
My boss Tom is a ‘crafty’ businessman. Once, making small talk, I mentioned that I commute by train, and when he learned that I was using my phone as a hotspot for internet access on board, he immediately had his secretary buy me a $149 Karma WiFi with 100 GB of data, telling me to use it freely. After that, my time on the train was almost entirely devoted to the company.
(2)
I often joke with friends that I can’t escape fate’s torment. In Beijing, home and office sat at opposite ends of a diagonal; even commuting off-peak (out at six, back at seven), I spent two hours a day on the road. Then I came to Silicon Valley and escaped the city’s congestion. I thought I’d enjoy the blissful village life of hopping in the car and cruising to work. Instead I shot myself in the foot: I asked my boss to move me to Juniper’s San Francisco office, and repeated the Beijing mistake all over again. Last year I moved to a new company, adRise, in San Francisco’s ‘CBD,’ which made things worse still: I can afford to drive but not to park (parking runs about $500 a month), so I was reduced to the wretched existence of taking the train to work every day. If that means nothing to you, imagine living in Wuqing, Tianjin, and working every day at China World Trade Center Tower 3. No — it’s actually worse than that. American trains crawl like snails; even the so-called bullet, the ‘baby bullet,’ takes 51 minutes to cover this tiny distance (40 miles or so), and it damn well runs late or breaks down all the time. A whole era behind my great Celestial Empire.
So you see, by the time the train reaches San Francisco, the clock points to a random number between 7:03 and 7:12, and our beloved Old Man Sun has already climbed into the sky. On days free of ‘smog,’ he tints half the heavens red with dawn clouds — quite beautiful, really.
San Francisco’s climate is held hostage by the Pacific; fog and cloud are everyday fare. So although it sits a stone’s throw from Silicon Valley, the two belong to different worlds weather-wise. Sunshine is not something you can take for granted in this city; every step you walk makes you miss Cupertino’s warm, lazy sun.
After getting off the train, unless it’s raining, I usually take Townsend to 3rd Street, head north to Mission Street, then east to the office. Where Townsend turns onto 3rd Street, a young Indian woman in a helmet always whizzes past me on a scooter; then at the corner of 3rd and Bryant I pass a balding middle-aged white guy who looks uncannily like a former colleague. As I near Mission, a woman with a model’s figure comes striding toward me in high heels, and as we brush past each other I can’t help reflecting that even those who live off their looks have to keep the same punishing hours as those of us who can’t live off ours — and my heart finds its balance again.
If any one of them is missing from my morning walk, something feels off all day.
(3)
Walking briskly from the station, it takes twenty minutes to reach the office. I usually arrive around 7:25; after a few pleasantries with the Mexican cleaning lady, I crack open my Soylent and begin the day’s work, drinking as I go. The stretch from 7:30 to 10:00 is the golden time of day — I can work almost entirely without distraction. After ten, people trickle in, and a flood of matters, discussions, and meetings follows, leaving no breathing room. Often I surface and glance at the clock and it’s past noon; glance again and it’s five in the afternoon.
We’re an interesting company: a dozen or so engineers handling twenty-some projects, a workload that at any other company would call for two or three times the headcount. Put positively, we’re an efficient team; put negatively, we’re torturing ourselves. Efficient or torturous, for an engineer’s growth this is an environment you can’t ask for and can’t easily find: plenty of legacy systems to refactor, plenty of room to explore back and forth.
(4)
Feng Lun says that greatness is something you stew out of yourself. ‘Stewing’ is a necessary but not sufficient condition for ‘greatness.’ Stew long enough and you may emerge like Leonardo DiCaprio in his triumphant year; stew without emerging and you may end up as Murong Fu of the Southern Murong, all vain hope and empty fame. Sometimes the distance between the two is a hair’s breadth.
Life at a startup is not easy: under pressure at every hour, feeling the nearness of life and death at every moment. Our neighbor jobscore moved out recently, and we seized the whole stretch they vacated, two conference rooms included. The conqueror enjoys a moment of satisfaction, but when the rabbits are gone the hound gets cooked; even as we lament, we can’t help feeling the pity of fellow wanderers at the far ends of the earth. Often, sitting in the new conference room with its fine view, looking down on row upon row of towers, a question leaps up: who will be sitting in this seat next round?
jobscore moved out — but only to other premises. Our other neighbor storybox vanished without a trace. As an app in the still-niche field of storytelling, building users (traffic) and building revenue are the nameless pain forever lodged in the chest. storybox raised $2M in 2011 with no further funding after that; four years on, the money is presumably nearly burned through.
jobscore, meanwhile, is still inching forward. jobscore, as the name suggests, is in the recruiting business. I poked around Crunchbase and found that it was founded all the way back in 2004, and in 2008 was written up in the press as a shining star of Web 2.0. Twelve years on, the seas have turned to mulberry fields. jobscore has outlasted 99.9% of the startups of its era — but sadly it has never managed to go from long-suffering daughter-in-law to mother-in-law. I remember when I arrived at adRise last November, the team still looked thriving; but after the New Year, things went the way of Wang Xiao’er’s New Year — worse every day.
And we, for now, are still healthy. The old folks say: money in the pocket, no panic in the heart. A steady stream of revenue lets us live more unhurriedly and think about longer-term questions. ‘Without distant worries, near troubles will come.’ A startup can’t be content merely to eat its fill (though eating your fill is step one); you have to eat what’s in your bowl, keep your eye on the pot, and think about what’s in everyone else’s mouth. Covet Shu even while holding Long, by all means — but keep your feet on solid ground. ‘Spread a layer of soil, tamp it down, spread another layer’ — that is always the right way to build.
(5)
The days of catching trains are unhappy ones; life feels like it’s being yanked along by an invisible hand. When the five o’clock bell sounds, whether I’m writing code or sitting in a meeting, my brain is unconditionally preempted by a higher-priority process, and like the hero of The Pursuit of Happyness I set off on my train-catching quest. I have to cross Bryant along 2nd St. before 5:09, clear the light at 2nd and Townsend before 5:12, then head west on Townsend, so that I reach the intersection with 3rd around 5:14 and get through it before that big light turns red. Once I’ve passed this series of checkpoints, catching the 5:20 home to Sunnyvale is a foregone conclusion.
The car I ride home in is fixed, too. Its exit lines up exactly with my beloved car, which has baked in the sun all day long, and that lets me escape this den of iniquity before the tide of people and traffic jams the entire parking lot. Only at this hour do I remember the virtues of rising early. I once wrote proudly in my diary: the person in this world who could persistently contest me for the best parking spot in the commuter lot has either not yet been born, or does not exist within the three realms and the five elements.
(6)
After winding my way home and arriving close to seven, I’m greeted by my daughter’s shrieks. I play with her briefly, eat a lavish dinner my wife has prepared, and feel the day’s goodness. After that I either write or do battle with various urgent issues (traffic spikes in the evening and at weekends, when problems break out most often). Once the kid is in bed at 9:30, the day is more or less done. Closing my eyes to rest for a moment, I sometimes can’t believe how much my life has changed. Fourteen months in America, three homes, three jobs; every day I feel dead tired, and every day I can still live with pride. As it says in The Remains of the Day:
In any case, there’s no turning back the clock now. One can’t be forever dwelling on what might have been. One should realize one has as good as most, perhaps better, and be grateful.
