Avalanche Aphrodisiac: Ep 1

A new just-for-fun satire content piece every Friday

A single, sexless 20-something-year-old software engineer quits his job. Disillusioned with the world around him he chances upon an opportunity with a nymphomaniac he meets on a dating site.

She flicked her hair and pouted her lips as she sat across from me. I had just abandoned my job as a software engineer at Google; I was on a date with a woman I had met on a dating site the day before, specifically catered for one night stands and hook ups. It was my third date in a week. The other two dates hadn’t gone so well, but I couldn’t figure out why. A friend told me that I was probably lacking in the “right pheromones”. My roommate told me that I didn’t embody the kind of domineering, physical presence women seemed to be drawn to. “It’s all about natural selection”, he had told me. As I sat in an Uber on the way to my date, I couldn’t help think that maybe it was because I just didn’t earn enough money.

At this point, what this particular woman did for a living isn’t important.

What’s important is what she was wearing; let me rephrase that: What’s important is what she wasn’t wearing. Underneath her vapid summer dress I could see the imperceptible outline of her nipples. Beneath the fabric, I started to think I had finally found something I could believe in.

“So, what do you do?” she said, more so out of politeness than interest.

Usually, in a moment like this one, I would invent an interesting job; more often than not it would be something noble, something unproblematic, and if possible, something masculine.

Sometimes I would tell my dates that I was a botanist, a postman, or a carpenter. “Jesus was a carpenter,” one woman told me. That was the last time I used “carpenter” - I didn’t believe in God. I never told them I was a “doctor” or a “teacher” - I quickly discovered that the women I met online were often teachers themselves, and a doctor’s work seemed too complicated a profession to falsify.

One day in the office, as the morning drifted by without any commotion, I told my colleague, Simon, about these imagined personas I would embody when I went on dates, and he said that he felt the same; it was embarrassing when the dreaded - yet inevitable - question arose: So, what do you do? Only to tell them that you worked in tech. Women often yawned at the mere mention of the word, on one particular date one of the women I had met didn’t even bother to stifle her expression of disinterest, like a lioness looks upon awakening. Other women thought it meant I had the ability to spy on them. In any case, the type of women I wanted weren’t the type to ever look at a guy like me. I certainly wasn’t what you might call a Master of the Universe.

I was sick of lying, but also of feeling like I my time was being amputated writing code for a company that knew everything about me; from where I lived, to who I lived with, what restaurants I ate at, what genre of pornography I watched. I was tired of eating Google food on the Google campus, wearing Google clothes, feeling like I was terminally online. It was as if every single aspect of my life was built around this ever present but illusive abstraction, and that if I refused to take the blue pill they shoved down everyone’s throats everyday then my life would be even worse than it already was.

The waiter brought our drinks to the table; he was sweating profusely and looked like a walking advertisement for Ambien. Overworked, underpaid and more importantly, underappreciated. I could relate to him; after all, every struggle is relative.

Sat opposite her, I tried to think of something interesting to say.

I was tired of reinventing myself each time I met a woman online, and still not being invited home with them, or even asked on a second date; when I graduated from college two years previously I thought my dry spell would finally end, but since then I’ve continued looking around in vein for a wet suit.

“Why don’t you tell them you’re in the army – that’s something kind of noble,” my colleague had suggested over lunch in the canteen one afternoon. Shaking my head in disbelief, I told him I disagreed, almost as much as I did when he later suggested I tell them that I’m a policeman. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I told him.

When I graduated from university and started my internship as a software engineer, I felt like I had finally found my community, people that could relate to me, the foibles I endured. Myself and the other interns dreamed of the power and the money a job in a place like this could bring us, oblivious to the absurdity of the territorial chaos it bred. With time, I started to resent the industry, my bosses, even some of my colleagues, a few of who insisted that we were the chosen ones. There, I wasn’t the Apex predator I thought I would be; I was still the prey. In a place like that, there are fewer predators then you think.

“I’m actually unemployed,” I found myself saying, speaking honestly for the first time about a subject I felt that lying was the only solution to. She didn’t look as disappointed as I expected her to look; she remained kind of neutral, shuffled slightly in her seat, and cleared her throat.

“You don’t look unemployed,” she said, looking at my wrist. I looked at my hands that were facing down on the table, nervously vibrating, so I put them into my lap, and then clasped them together as if meditating in prayer; I contemplated removing my Pixel Watch, but it was too late.

“It’s a recent thing,” I said, “like, as of yesterday.” Taking intermittent swigs of beer from the glass, I went on to tell her that I had handed in my notice a month prior, and had spent most of my remaining days on the campus sat in front of my desk, doing virtually nothing, pretending to work, while my managers pretended not to notice. More and more Google employees seemed to be speaking out about their warped view of the company, and the last thing they wanted was another ex-employee leaving a negative review online.

“Why didn’t you spend your time looking for a new job?” she asked, her middle and index finger perched between the stem of her glass as she gently rotated it round and round without drinking from it. She had ordered a bottle of Barolo for herself, while in front of me I had a beer, already half empty, the glass covered in condensation from the heat of the restaurant.

“I’m at a crossroad, I guess.”

She laughed – at first breathless, then smothered by her hand which she used to cover her mouth.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“I guess I misjudged you.”

Now I cleared shuffled in my seat, cleared my throat.

“Can I ask you something? Why did you choose to go on a date with me?”

A short silence followed, but there was a kind of awkwardness to the silence, as if she was really thinking of the answer, because now, she didn’t seem to know.

“I guess there was a kind of anonymity to your profile – and I like being anonymous.”

“What exactly is it that you do then?” I asked, my eyes inconceivably drawn her dress, or more specifically, what lay beneath it, realising then that I would probably never find out.

“Well, I don’t really do a whole lot,” she said, laughing.

“Why is that?”

“My ex-boyfriend gave me these digital coins for my birthday a few years ago. In fact, he gave me two.”

“And?”

“And I almost dumped him right there and until I found out what they were. Recently I sold one of them and made almost a year’s salary.

She looked at her phone while I sat there, regretting having not created yet another fiction for my life. Yet I was intrigued – but no longer by her.

“So what happened – you sold the coins and dumped him?”

“No, he turned out to be a total scumbag and was cheating on me the whole time. Now he’s dating a model from the new Gucci campaign.”

She took out her phone, opened Instagram and showed me his profile. I studied him closely, but was too stunned to speak. He looked like a carbon copy of me: short, skinny, with odd, yet recessive features. Then I looked at his girlfriend, the drop-dead gorgeous brunette stood next to him; her blue eyes piercing through the screen. I even recognised her from a billboard I’d seen the city earlier that week.

“I recognise her,” I said, my voice lighter now, morbidly relieved that my date had taken the spotlight away from hers.

“Anyway, I don’t care about him or his life anymore. The most interesting people are the ones you don’t hear about, the ones you don’t see online. The anonymous Masters of the Universe,” she said, her eyes bulging slightly when she said “Universe”. There was a pause, before she delivered a blow: “My guess is you’re not one of these people.”

“No, not yet,” I said.

I was running out of ideas, of an actual urge to even continue the conversation.

“Well, go back to the drawing board, start again. Have you heard of cryptocurrency before?”

Suddenly, I felt a bolt of ecstasy shoot through me from stem to sternum; I no longer cared about the delicious creature sat across from me. I knew what I had to do; the moment of realisation had finally arrived.