My Job

When people ask "what do you do?" and they mean "what's your job," when they ask it in the same way that college students ask "what's your major" they're usually just trying to flirt or find some common ground, or both, something to commiserate over, because perhaps you too work in an office or as a dispatcher at a trucking company. Perhaps the shared experience of fixing ice cream machines or nursing will lead to some intimacy. That’s the hope behind the question.

Or perhaps you, like I, actually do have an interesting job, a job as interesting as every lawyer or doctor seems to believe their job is. Perhaps you are a spy, or a smuggler.

I am a detective, so I lie about my job. And like any good lie, it's mostly the truth. I call myself an investigator, an investment analyst, anything to avoid the D word that sends my conversation partner down the wrong path.

I don't work for the police. They don't solve enough crimes for my tastes, and I really don't care about most of the ones they do. I am not like most private detectives, who love to ask “what do you do” so they can say that they are private detectives.

I don’t sit outside of cheap hotels hoping for pictures and I don’t spend eighteen hours a day on Facebook, going through a timeline your divorce lawyer said you should delete. I’m a corporate bullshit detector in Silicon Valley, where most things are more hype than reality, where there are hundreds of millionaires waiting to throw billions of dollars at thousands of things that are little more than an elevator pitch and a mock-up done by an artist crashing on a couch.

So when someone says their new machine can tell fifty different emotions on any human face, and they have a very carefully crafted cover story to deploy when some of those emotions don’t technically exist, a guy with more money than sense will call me. I look into it. It’s not cheap. It’s cheaper than investing a billion dollars on a machine that can match romantic partners by scanning their blood, and it’s surprisingly easy. Usually there’s some dumb giveaway in plain sight.

The word “quantum” is one of those giveaways. I’ve never had a quantum anything pan out. So when a worried venture capitalist who just bet America’s grandparent’s retirements on a “Quantum Chronological Learning Network” calls me and pays my tab I figure it’s an easy bet. There’s no learning, there’s no quantum, there’s barely a chronology and maybe there’s a network, I figure.

So I fake some credentials and go into their job interview. I sign the worthless NDAs and pretend I’ll work for stock options when the guy tells me something that blows my mental bullshit alarm so loud I’m worried he can actually hear it.

“This technology could mean an end to secrets.” he says

“You mean an end to encryption?” I ask, because I’ve read the brochure.

“No.” He says with a seriousness I don’t see outside of spooks and cultists. “We could accidentally learn everything.”