Source: When I Went to a Bogus Conference to Look Important Publisher: Cartoons Hate Her | Author: Cartoons Hate Her Published: January 6, 2026 | Archived: March 21, 2026

What follows is another true story about my career in tech, similar to When I Worked in Big Tech and Everyone Fucking Hated Me and I Threw The Worst Networking Event of All Time.

I had been at Zapify for about a year before I heard something I hoped I would never hear: “There’s a conference in Las Vegas.”

At that moment, I genuinely hoped one of those North Korean ballistic missiles I kept incessantly googling would hit the entire Zapify office, killing me immediately (preferably only me somehow–I mean, this wasn’t anyone else’s problem). But to my and Kim Jong Un’s chagrin, nothing happened. I sat in front of my computer staring at the unforgiving words on my Slack channel. Las Vegas. Conference.

Predictably, my sales colleagues Derek and Jim were thrilled because they wanted to go to Las Vegas. I, on the other hand, was terrified and on the verge of quitting solely over this. Work travel was easily my number-one fear, fueled by my OCD. My OCD often made no sense: I regularly drank strangers’ half-empty drinks left over in bars, and I never worried once about getting roofied, but I was 100% certain that if I went on a work trip and left my husband Nick to fend for himself, he’d electrocute himself on a counterfeit iPhone charger and I wouldn’t be there to call 911.

The person who suggested this Las Vegas conference was our interim boss, Fred. My previous boss Ji-hoon had recently quit, and Fred was filling in for Ji-hoon until we could find a replacement. I didn’t have the close relationship with Fred that I had with Ji-hoon, so I wasn’t sure what to say to get out of this. Instead of telling him the truth about my OCD, something I had successfully kept under wraps for the past year at Zapify, I simply vomited multiple different excuses all at once: “Actually I think Nick and I are going out of town that weekend, and besides, I looked at the attendance list and none of my clients are going. Also, my childhood dog might be getting put down in a few months.” (Okay, I didn’t actually say that last one, but that’s only because my childhood dog had been put down the previous year and I had already milked it for all it was worth.)

My coworker Derek messaged me privately and said “Just so you know, if I were Fred, I would not be happy with that answer.” I kind of couldn’t believe he said that to me. Who even cared? He wasn’t my boss and if anything, me doing something to look stupid should have been a net positive for him, because he’d look better in comparison.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because you just immediately jumped to all the reasons you can’t do it. It makes it seem like you just aren’t taking it seriously.”

I thought about telling Derek about my anxiety, but he didn’t seem like the kind of person who would understand. I didn’t think he was the right audience for airing my mental health concerns. (Honestly, this was a major moment of growth for me because up until that year I probably would have started crying and told him everything, then asked him if he was mad at me every day for the next eight months.)

The conversation came to a head with Fred when, during our 1:1, he mentioned he had received feedback that I was doing “non-work related things at work” including but not limited to “going on Facebook.” Not far off from the Reddit-related feedback I had received from Ji-hoon.

The truth was, there literally wasn’t enough work for an eight-hour day, and this felt like a massive open secret that everyone should have just acknowledged. I wasn’t on Reddit, or Facebook or any other site because I didn’t want to work. It was because I was done working. There were a limited number of people to email, and given our relatively niche product, a limited number of cold prospects to contact. Now, one could argue that I could have spent my downtime doing e-learning seminars about SEO, and yes, I probably could have, but other people in the office (read: men) frequently spent their downtime playing vintage arcade games in the Zapify cafeteria, or shooting Nerf darts at each other across from the adult ball pit. Given that our office looked like a daycare for gigantic babies, I felt a bit peeved that something as mundane as going on a forbidden unproductive website was such a transgression.

The first time I received this feedback from Ji-hoon, I was new and eager to please. But at this point, I was pretty annoyed.

“I don’t really go on Facebook that often,” I said. “At least not to the point that it interferes with my work.”

“I know,” Fred said. “But it’s about perception. It gives people the idea that you aren’t hard-working. Even if you hit all your revenue goals, the perception is that you aren’t doing your job.”

“I hate to be this person,” I said, my entire chest vibrating with anticipation of doing something extremely uncharacteristic. “But I have to ask if Derek and Jim ever get this feedback when they play video games. Or any other man in the office when they play video games. Or play soccer. Or take hours off to watch the World Cup on the projector in the micro kitchen.”

Fred stammered. “Well, I–I don’t know what feedback they get.”

“They don’t get that feedback,” I said. “I’m almost positive they don’t. You’re Derek and Jim’s manager too. I’m not calling you a sexist, I’m sure you’re just passing along the information but…I have to wonder if this company on the whole has a problem with sexism.”

Fred immediately reversed course. He knew it was true. I knew it was true. I knew he knew it was true. But he couldn’t very well tell me to post that Justin Timberlake “It’s Gonna Be May” meme on Facebook for four hours a day in the name of women’s liberation, so he just said “I hear you, and that’s a concern I take very seriously. Just try not to have your screen visible when senior leadership is behind you, okay?”

Wow. Okay. So Fred was a decent person after all. And maybe I had a little more power over my circumstances than I thought.

“I also wanted to talk to you about the Las Vegas conference,” he said.

Feeling that I could finally just be honest about how I felt, I went right into it.

“I’m sorry I gave all those weird excuses,” I said. “Since we’re being honest, none of those things are actually the issue. The issue is that I have really severe anxiety. Travel is a huge trigger for me. If it’s just one day or something I could maybe make it work, but if it’s a whole week, I’m sorry, I’m going to be having anxiety attacks the whole time. If there are any conferences located in San Francisco, I’ll gladly go to those. And obviously if it’s the kind of thing where I’m fired if I don’t go, I’ll go, but I’m just trying to be honest with you.”

Again, Fred surprised me. “I never knew that,” he said. “That’s a disability.”

“Is it?” I asked. “I mean, I’m not like…crippled or anything.”

“Anxiety definitely qualifies as a disability under the ADA. That means you’re eligible for reasonable accommodations.”

I liked the way this was sounding. I had never heard of this before. Why hadn’t anyone ever told me I was disabled? Or that I could be accommodated? I felt like a bit of an imposter. Was I actually disabled, or just an extremely difficult person? Could I be both? Of course!

“So what do I do?”

“Well, you need to speak with HR and sign some paperwork to determine which accommodations you need in order to do your job. So for you, I guess no travel would be one of those things.”

“And I can’t be fired or punished for it?”

“No, that would be illegal.”

Fred was right. It would be illegal, although it could obviously still be done. It didn’t occur to me for a while that one could easily just fire someone for their disability, but claim they were doing it for the kosher reason of “no reason at all.”

I decided that the next time there was a conference in San Francisco, I would specifically volunteer to go, if only to show Fred that I actually did care about my job, although secretly I thought all of these conferences were a waste of time. But perception clearly mattered more than substance, so I would go along with that charade if I had to.

Then Zapify hired Kyle. Kyle was another salesperson, but wasn’t in direct competition with Jim, Derek or me because he prospected a completely different pool of customers for a side-product of the main Zapify platform. I shouldn’t have been competitive with him, but I was anyway, because Fred announced that “Senior leadership thinks nobody has a good work ethic at this company except for Kyle.” A major reason why Kyle had such a great work ethic was that working in the mobile advertising space genuinely seemed to be his life dream, the way being in the NBA or being a rock star might be other people’s dreams. He was the Spongebob to the Zapify Krusty Krab, overly enthusiastic and excited about work that was pretty much never anyone’s first choice.

Kyle was my age (twenty-six) but had an ageless, timeless way about him, like he came from another decade or perhaps even another planet but was doing a very good impression of a modern-day young man. I don’t know if he was straight or gay, because I couldn’t picture him dating anyone at all, and he never talked about his personal life. Every Monday at our team meeting, we would each share what we did over the weekend. Without fail, we’d talk about parties, restaurants, family visiting, or even just a relaxing weekend watching TV. But the first time Kyle was meant to share details of his weekend, he said, “Hosted a great networking event at my apartment for anyone interested in mobile adtech. Met some great entrepreneurs across the entire mobile app space, really great conversation.” I doubted this was even true, but assuming it was true, I figured this was a one-off and that Kyle’s other weekend stories would be at least tangentially personal and not work-related. I was wrong. Every single time that Kyle was asked to share what he did that weekend, he either claimed to have worked the entire time, hosted some kind of mini-conference in his bathroom, or went to a bar and wound up prospecting half the people there, who also happened to be mobile advertisers.

I could see why senior leadership liked him, but of course, I hated him. One day when I was at a doctor’s appointment, I returned to discover Kyle had somehow been reaching out to all my clients to inform them I was out of office and he was there to help with anything they needed. I couldn’t even chalk this up to Kyle trying to “steal” my clients because he didn’t touch my side of the business. It felt pathologically helpful, like breaking into someone’s house to make their bed. What was wrong with this dude? I told Fred about it, and he said it wasn’t the first time he got this feedback about Kyle–he had apparently been prospecting some teenage app developers (as in the developers of the app themselves were teenagers, not that the app was for teenagers) and had resorted to sending them multiple video Snapchats a day after they stopped responding to his emails. Although Kyle had been “talked to” about this behavior, senior leadership still thought he was the only person at the company who was “hungry” enough to get the job done.

Realizing Kyle was making me look like a terrible employee because I didn’t harass teenagers on social media and I dared to have interests outside of work (and considering I didn’t have the reputation of being a hard worker in the first place), I decided I needed to step it up. I googled conferences in San Francisco and found a technology conference on the peninsula, about an hour’s car ride away. It wasn’t specific to mobile advertising, but mobile advertising was a component. It was also free. I told Fred about it and he said it was a great idea for me to go. I specifically chose not to announce this plan at the team meeting, in fear that Kyle would join me.

A few days before I was set to go to the conference, Fred told me that Kyle would be joining me.

“How did he find out about this!?” I blurted out.

“Oh, he’s speaking there!” Fred said. “Yes, Kyle is one of the keynote speakers.”

Kyle had been in this industry for maybe six months, and I have no idea to this day how he secured the position as a keynote speaker. This also made me wonder if I could have just emailed the organizers of the conference and asked to be a keynote speaker, but I never would have thought to do something so presumptuous. Fred told me that Kyle and I could go to the conference together. But what was even the point? I was only going to make Kyle look bad and somehow now Kyle was coming out of this looking better than me.

On the day of the conference, Kyle and I left the office and hopped into an Uber. For all his faults, Kyle wasn’t a nasty person to be around. In fact, because Kyle and I were both so annoying, it wasn’t uncommon for us to wind up stuck together at happy hours because we were the only two people nobody else wanted to include in their conversations. But given how threatened I felt by Kyle, I wasn’t ready to be his friend. Sure, I didn’t think someone in Kyle’s role was capable of stealing my clients, but I also didn’t think Kyle would be able to become the keynote speaker of a conference he found out about just days ago. Who knew what he was capable of?

Kyle pulled out his laptop and talked about how excited he was to speak at the conference, and what a great opportunity it was. I didn’t have the heart to tell him this conference would almost certainly include nobody worthwhile as far as our prospect lists went, and was only a ploy to “seem hardworking.”

“Do you mind if I practice?” Kyle asked, motioning to the deck on his computer.

“Oh, of course, no problem,” I said.

With that, Kyle smiled hauntingly at the empty passenger seat in front of him, and spoke at a volume befitting an actual speech in front of hundreds of people. “Hoooow’s everyone doing today? Nice sunny day, beautiful San Francisco weather, right? Now what would you all say if I asked you if you like making money? Right? Okay, I see some hands up. Now what if I asked you–do you like making money WITH MOBILE ADS?!” Kyle started clapping and faux-laughing. “All right, that’s what I thought! Well today we’re gonna talk about the future of mobile and advertising–and we’re all gonna make a lot of money! So come on, who’s with me? Nah, you guys are still asleep, come on, let’s get loud!”

Okay, something was deeply wrong with Kyle. The Uber driver didn’t react, although I made eye-contact with him briefly in the rearview mirror.

When we got to the conference, we got our badges. Mine was green, and Kyle’s was blue because he was a VIP. Apparently Kyle had access to a VIP lounge. I did not have access to this lounge. This meant Kyle had access to lemon poppyseed muffins and hot drinks. I did not have access to those things, although I was given a complimentary room-temperature bottle of Dasani.

“You can be my assistant for the day,” Kyle announced, handing me his backpack. “You can join me at the lounge.”

I should have told him to fuck off with this demeaning nonsense, but this meant I would be getting free food, so I went along with it. I held his stuff at the VIP lounge while he continued to practice his speech and milled around trying to network with other VIPs, all of whom looked about as out-of-place and unimportant as Kyle did. I wondered for a moment if this entire conference was a joke, and the person who decided to host it only did it because they wanted to have the “perception” of being a hard worker. How many things in our careers were 100% unnecessary, done only for perception? I shuddered thinking about it. Maybe we could have fixed climate change and provided free healthcare to everyone if we just didn’t spend resources on this kind of thing. Okay, this conference had officially radicalized me. I was going to interrupt Kyle’s speech and shout “Seize the means of production!” Nah, just kidding, but I was very upset.

“Would you mind holding this?” Kyle asked, handing me his cup of coffee as we made our way to the stage–a makeshift platform in front of about forty seats. Okay, this was beyond the pale. How was I going to hold his coffee, while also holding my two cups of tea, donut, muffin, and all the strawberries and pineapples strategically extracted from the fruit salad? Fuck off, Kyle.

“I’d like to put a video of my talk on social media,” Kyle said. “Would you mind filming it?”

“Sure,” I said, shoving all our food under my seat. It occurred to me that if I had been single, and Kyle had been attractive, I would have loved doing all this for him, and I would have gone the extra mile to refill his coffee between rehearsals. After all, back when Nick and I were in college, I used to bring him breakfast in bed from the dining hall every morning. But because I was married, and because Kyle was extremely irritating, I felt indignant feminist rage over these tasks.

I began filming Kyle as he started his speech, which I might have thought was somewhat organic and friendly if he hadn’t recited the small talk word-for-word in the cab. Half of the people in the audience looked like they didn’t even own a mobile phone, let alone understood anything about mobile advertising. There was a huge guy sitting next to me with his arms crossed angrily, who kept interrupting Kyle to see if he could stump him with some argument disguised as a question. I continued filming, for once actually feeling a bit sorry for Kyle.

At one point, the video footage of Kyle took up all the space on my phone and I had to stop filming unless I wanted to delete other videos and photos. After Kyle’s talk, I told him about the issue with my phone and Kyle was clearly furious about this, but nodded in a series of small spasms and said with thin lips. “That’s okay. That’s fine. That’s okay.”

We made our way back to the Zapify office. I was thrilled to have successfully completed a conference, despite having done absolutely nothing other than hold Kyle’s coffee. Kyle, I’m sure, was also happy to be able to tell everyone he was a keynote speaker even though nobody absorbed anything he said. We looked at each other and said nothing, but I could tell we were both thinking the same thing–we would tell everyone this went well, for no reason other than perception.