People worked long hours. They had postural problems, the sort you get from sitting at a desk all day. Many of them did not exercise or strengthen their body, so the wear and tear of being on a computer for ten to twelve hours straight was even worse because they had muscle weakness. We also had people who would go home and game all night long and get three hours of sleep and come back to work and then wonder why they hurt all the time.
Mostly, though, people were just stressed out. So they had the muscle tension that comes with that.What kind of tension is that?
Somebody might come in and say, “Oh, my shoulders feel a bit tight.” And then as you start to work on their shoulders, it feels completely solid. Like their back is a single slab of marble. You cannot differentiate the different muscles from each other or even from the bones of the spine. Everything is tense in equal measure and everything feels the same.
Of course, it’s incredibly tiring to apply pressure to a body like that. It’s not so different from trying to soften up old meat. So you end up worrying about your hands. I have arthritis developing in a couple of my joints.Tell us about the people who came in for massages. What were your interactions like?
Only direct employees of the company could use the service. I voiced a desire many times to work on the kitchen staff, who were contract workers like us. There was a young woman in the cafeteria who had lymphedema. It was congenital; she’d had it since she was a child. Her legs were huge. And I wanted to work on her because she had to stand or lean on a stool all day. Having a little bit of massage would have helped her tremendously. But she wasn’t allowed.So were most of the people you saw software engineers?
It was a mix. There were some difficult young men who came in and wanted to express their dominance. They were almost exclusively engineers. They would ask me a lot of questions about how I was trained and what I knew about the body. Quizzing me on my job while receiving a massage.How would you respond?
I usually tried to rebalance things by answering their questions about my background and my training matter-of-factly, and then just stop talking. So they would realize that quizzing me was not the point of the massage. Sometimes I would just lean on the sore parts of their body. That’s one fail-safe trick to get someone out of their head and back into the present.
One guy in particular stood out to me because he always insisted on taking off his shirt to get a massage. He was very hairy, and he seemed unaware that back hair is difficult to massage. He had just gone to his first Burning Man right around the time he joined the company, and he had just discovered CrossFit. He liked to talk about both. I remember him to this day. You never forget a hairy back.What about the women?
There were a lot of female administrative staff. They tended to be physically fit, trim, attractive younger women.
Many of them seemed stressed and sad. It sent my antennae up. I felt protective. The vibe was that they always had to have a smile on their face. They had to joke along with the guys. They had to be smart and funny. They had to be entertaining. I worried about them.
All of the executives at the company had their own administrative assistants. I remember one woman in particular. She was gorgeous. She was in her twenties, twenty-eight at the most. She wasn’t the assistant to the CEO, but to someone right below him. One day, she came in incredibly stressed. She had scheduled a thirty-minute massage for herself. She came in holding her phone, which was how her executive communicated with her. And when she lay down on the table, she wouldn’t let go of it.
I don’t just mean the phone was on the massage table with her. Plenty of other people did that, which was fine with me. I mean she was literally holding it during her session.
I tried to take it out of her hand and we nearly had a fight. When I reached for it, she yanked it back. I wanted to be maternal and caring, but also assertive. Like, you’re not gonna get anything out of the massage if you’re on the phone. There was a back-and-forth there for a second, a real tug-of-war. Finally, I thought: The horse is out of the barn. I guess she needs this phone. So I let go.
Feeling her body, I could tell that she was near some kind of break. Just physically and emotionally drained.
A few minutes later, something happened on her phone and she got up and ran out.
Invisible LinesWhat did people talk about during their massages? Would people tell you about their work? Did they see you as someone they could confide in?
People almost never talked about work. I think they had all been told to be careful with the massage therapists for fear of spilling trade secrets. We were also all made to sign an NDA before working there. One of the conditions was that we couldn’t even reveal the name of the company. I mean, good Lord. My husband is a police detective. He has a top-secret clearance from the federal government, and he has more freedom to talk about where he worked and what he did than I did at that company at the very same time. He works on some sensitive stuff, like literal life-and-death stuff. The whole thing was kind of ridiculous.
One time, there was a woman who came to see me for a massage who was extremely upset. I think she worked in HR. She just lay
