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asshole, make up for all the nights he blew me off to hang out with his friends? No. But god I missed the way he made me laugh.
    Okay, of course I still loved Dave. We had our share of trouble, what couple doesn’t? We were together for five years, with stretches of separations and time-outs here and there. After I graduated from the University of Minnesota, I moved out here with him and we moved in together. Even with all the fighting and the occasional broken window, I always knew we’d work it out. We were young, we both had some oats to sow. I wasn’t worried.
    But I had to face the truth, and the truth was Dave and I were toxic together. Now I was twenty-five and the pressure was on. I didn’t want to be some old biddy when I had my kids. I needed to find a good man who would be a good father to our kids, and I needed to do it fast. Even if I met a guy soon, we’d need a year to date and a year to plan the wedding and then a year to be a young married couple without kids. Then I’d promptly get pregnant and nine months later I’d have our first kid with hardly any time to spare before I turned thirty.
    I needed a guy who could support me while I raised our kids. I used to think I wanted to be some big career woman. Then I got a job, and let me tell you, work sucks . Maybe there were some people out there who had careers that challenged their creativity and helped them learn and grow in some fulfilling sort of way. Maybe there were people who’d managed to get jobs with managers who weren’t complete idiots. I wasn’t one of them. Screw my career. I just wanted to be a good wife and mom.
    It really was the best thing that Dave and I had broken up. Dave was not the kind of guy who would be a good father to our children even though, god, they’d be soooo cute. A bartender and ski instructor who’d never finished college couldn’t afford to let me stay home with the kids.
    Speaking of men in upwardly mobile careers, where exactly was Tom? Didn’t he care about the loss of productivity? How was I supposed to get any work done if my computer crashed every time I opened Photoshop? Did he need to know I didn’t actually need to use Photoshop because Avery did all the graphics?
    How was I supposed to concentrate on work when I was in the midst of a fertility and romantic crisis? And who could work in such a managerially dysfunctional environment anyway?
    McKenna Marketing reminded me of the double-blind studies I learned about in psychology class in college. That’s when doctors prescribe patients pills, and neither the doctor nor the patient knows who is getting the placebo. That’s the way things worked around here. Absolutely no one knew what was going on. Orders were issued without the order-giver having any clue how things work in the real world. We order-takers nodded dumbly and tried to look busy, never really understanding what it was we were allegedly getting paid to do. The amount of work my manager Sharon assigned and the time we were given to get it done in was so wildly unrealistic, there seemed no point in even trying. Sharon was only another hapless cog in the McKenna Marketing machine. I understood that she took her orders from above and was not nearly as important as she thought she was, but it seemed to me that she should be the one to let the higher-ups know what could and couldn’t be accomplished in an eight-hour workday instead of always saying, “Yessah, yessah, we’ll get it all done, sah.”
    â€œTom!”
    â€œHi, I heard your computer crashed again.” He stood in the doorway, his thick arm muscles rippling Adonis-like from the sleeves of his T-shirt. “It may be time to get you a newer machine. You’ve been having a lot of troubles lately. What’s the latest issue?”
    â€œEvery time I open Photoshop I crash.”
    â€œWhat on earth do you need Photoshop for?” my evil officemate Avery