Losing One’s Grep

Words by JMD. Image by AI

At the software security conference Sarah stared all around the crowd of predominantly men with a creeping sense of judgement. At first she felt envy of their technological exploits but as she evolved into her own, after 8 years as a security engineer, the feeling morphed into something entirely different. She watched them throughout the week, seeing the same patterns again and again. Someone showing off a feature only their phone has.  A story of bravado about being the only person that knew how to fix the priority zero outage. A bold statement that everyone else at company X is useless. Staking claim for a point some presenter made that they, themselves, had also made only 3 days earlier at work. She was a part of this. Had been a part of this. For 8 years. 

Sarah gripped her hands tightly, twisting her neck to look at the crowd from all angles. Seated in the plush seats of the convention center auditorium the audience was animated by the speech going on. Fists pumped in the air. Spittle fleeing from the corners of people’s mouths. When the keynote speaker ended his presentation with the battle cry “grep your way to freedom”, the applause from the appreciative tech audience was only matched by the crescendo of surprised cookie crumbs, suddenly dislodged, hitting the floor. Sarah slowly rose to her feet, gave one last look upon the masses in technological rapture, and screamed across all their seated heads, “You know, I had the chance to be a famous actress!”