Replacement Effects

I sat there on my wife’s second computer staring at the screen. It had been moved into my office from hers a few months ago. When I had lost my job it had only made sense to step up and help her while she juggled a pair of jobs. They called it being Overemployed, and for Melissa it had just made sense. As a member of the HR team for a mid-sized company as her main job, she had picked up a second job working at a local startup during the Pandemic. While she had started in HR for the second job, those responsibilities had recently been subcontracted off to a third party team. Scrambling, she was able to apply for a number of internal jobs.

Ben was the only reason she was able to keep a job at the company. He knew she had some skill in simple code, and she begged him for help saying she just needed time to figure it out. It was around that time that my company decided that the recent acquisition had been an overstep and decided to lay off over 30% of its developers. Since we both worked from home, it only seemed natural to step up and help with Melissa’s second job so she could focus on her main job now that she was supporting the household by herself.

The following months were brutal in the tech industry as major companies began to lay people off. If it wasn’t a restructure, it was just a simple lay off to reduce spending. What it truly meant was that the tech industry was flush with capable developers. I had never really been much for selling myself, I was more inclined to let your work speak for itself. Plus, I was terrible at interviews. My anxiety ate away at me, so I fumbled a number of possible jobs at that stage. So I just kept plugging away at the simple tasks that Melissa’s second job was assigning her. I was careful to only submit code slowly so as not to throw off her pace once you found another job.

Early on in her Overemployment scheme, Melissa had come up with a brilliant move to help her differentiate between the jobs. Her job at TechCo as HR would only refer to her as Melissa, while she went by Missy for her development job at Finoptimize. And so, I found myself answering emails and replying as Missy every day. That started three months ago.

It had been going well. At first Melissa would jump between meetings. That quickly wore thin seeing as she would need to be briefed by me before any of her dev meetings. So one day during an emergency meeting, I simply logged on as her with no camera and did my best to copy her voice. I told everyone that I was getting over a cold recently, it helped hide my slightly lower tone. So now, I regularly call in as Missy. Over time people got used to me not using a camera. It helped that her direct report Ben was in on the duplicity. He had been friends with Melissa for a while now and when he found out about her circumstances, he was more than willing to let me step in.

It was a cushy situation in all honesty, you worked less than you needed to because the work assigned to you was a cake walk. So with less than 20 hours of work a week I was able to mess with side projects or just play video games. This week Melissa was at a conference for her HR job while I stayed home to continue her dev job. So I found myself relaxing in between stand ups and wondering what she was up to.