![]() Gabe told me they’d keep looking and give me updates. How could I not have memorized his plates? “Do you know his license plate number?” Gabe asked. “It’s not a joke.” Gabe’s voice was urgent but calm. “Gabe, if this is some sort of joke, it’s not funny,” I said, my voice cracking with worry. Yush dismissed it as “a guy thing” that I wouldn’t understand.īut this time they’d gone too far. I think he probably exaggerated swapping a few playful jabs with friends, but the idolization of violence still worried me. Yush told me that he sometimes ran a “fight club” in his room, where he and his friends would wrestle or take swipes at one another, imitating Brad Pitt from the movie. I knew that Yush’s friends often played pranks. Yush bought him a shot at the bar, toasting by quoting Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story, “To infinity and beyond!” Musk laughed, knocking back a shot on Yush’s command. One night, Elon Musk took the employees out for drinks. He coded software for a space capsule that delivered cargo to the International Space Station, but my friend Swapna and I joked that he made fireworks, because that was about the most complex projectile we could fathom. The summer that I graduated from college, Yush rented an apartment in Venice Beach while he interned at SpaceX. It felt like he was blasting off into the heavens, accelerating along the trajectory of his destiny. I found his insecurities and growing bias against women troubling, but at the time it didn’t feel like Yush was changing much. I gently pushed back, but my own lack of talent in math and science didn’t exactly support my case. He mused that the overwhelming majority of men in his computer science classes meant that women were less capable in science than men were. He devoured cookies, milk, and beer before bed to pack weight onto his wiry frame-an effort to bulk up, he said. He lived off a diet of pasta and five-hour energy drinks. I encouraged him to ask out one of my friends, a pretty Indian American woman who had a crush on him. He maintained a stellar GPA while taking the hardest courses the school offered in computer science and electrical engineering.īut as college progressed and his course load increased, Yush turned away from his social life. He joined the Google Lunar x Prize challenge to build a spacecraft and land it on the moon, ran a hackathon on campus, and learned to program his own operating system. I am sure it comforted our parents to know that we were there looking out for each other.Īlthough Yush had initially hesitated to study programming, in college he discovered tech projects that had the potential to change the world’s future. He camped out on my bedroom floor and helped me get to the bathroom, nursing me to health with gallons of Gatorade and Miyazaki films he downloaded on his laptop. During finals week my junior year, when I got severely dehydrated from the flu, Yush came over to my apartment between classes to check up on me. We saw each other every week, at least once if not more, and his friends became mine and mine became his. Yush attended Carnegie Mellon, living about a mile down the street from me when I went to Pitt. The call came three nights later, around midnight. All of my new training and knowledge will finally be put to use. We estimated that Sunday’s work, whatever it was, would cost the client an additional ten thousand dollars. “It doesn’t matter how much it costs, just do it,” he said. The partner leading the project told the analysts to cancel our Monday-morning flights we’d have to come up Sunday. On Friday evening, things became even less clear. After an entire week, I still did not understand the project or my role on it, yet I was there until ten o’clock every night. I had been brought in for an urgent, mysterious task, but no one told me what that was. I would spend my weekends in Pittsburgh, flying to Boston for the project, where I’d stay at a hotel from Monday through Thursday. In September, the firm placed me on a project in Boston. During that first month, I spent ten-hour days staring at PowerPoint slides in conference rooms, then six more weeks making PowerPoint slides from home about terms I would ultimately never understand. ![]() After a week of training in Pittsburgh, the new-hire class flew to Orlando, where hundreds of recent college graduates filled a convention hall and learned about how impressive the firm was and how impressive each of us was for being hired by the firm. I couldn’t explain to Mummy, Papa, or my brother Yush what this title meant or what my job entailed, though, because I myself had little idea. I worked as a business technology analyst, specializing in information management. As most of my classmates watched their futures collapse, I had accepted an offer from a prestigious management-consulting firm. ![]() America was a year into its deepest economic fallout since the Great Depression. ![]()
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