Category Archives: Workplace

Losing hair – the areas of concern for aging men and women

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While on a customer call with a colleague this morning, we waited for our customer to join and made some small talk. My colleague asked how Kaia was doing since I told him that I had to pick her up early at school the previous day due to a fever she had. I shared with him that she was at home with us today, and Chris and I were tag teaming between meetings to care for her. He laughed and said, “Yeah, it never gets easier. And my kids are the reason I have bags under my eyes that won’t go away and far less hair on my head!” 

I told him that while all that may have a hint of truth to it, he and the male species were not alone in their hair loss. While men lose the hair on their head, women start losing hair in our eyebrows, I lamented. I was certainly not immune to this. In fact, I remembered that at some point in my mid-30s, I started plucking my eyebrows far less frequently… because the hairs just weren’t growing back, or were growing back far more slowly. I’d never had thick, well defined eyebrows in my life, but once my mid-30s hit and then pregnancy and childbirth, it’s like it’s been all downhill for my eyebrows ever since. 

He chuckled at my comment. “Yeah, but at least with women, you can just draw them back on and it can still look natural. Men can’t draw back the hairs on their head and make it look believable!” 

Well, touche. He wins. 

The Malin SoHo co-working space

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One of the perks I get as a remote employee of my company is 12 company-paid bookings at co-working spaces through an app called Gable. My company rolled out this offering earlier this year as a way to get employees who work in remote locations to work and meet with other employees in the same area. I hadn’t had a reason to take advantage of this until Kaia started at her new school downtown. I finally booked a space yesterday so that I could attend Kaia’s school’s Halloween parade, and it was an interesting experience to be in a workspace where I was surrounded by total strangers instead of colleagues.

The Malin SoHo co-working space is a short 10-minute walk from Kaia’s school, and from the photos, it looked like a very modern, poshly furnished space. There’s a kitchen that is stocked with a proper coffee machine (flat whites or cappuccinos, anyone?), a water machine with multiple settings/temperatures, a fridge, microwave, and real ceramic bowls, plates, and silverware. The space has couches, diner-like booths, long desks, as well as designated work desks that you can reserve (and pay extra for). There are also a good number of private, sound-proof phone booths, as well as beautifully appointed and different sized conference rooms that you can also book and pay extra for. The space has good lighting and lots of natural light (of course, the areas where there is natural light, you have to pay extra to sit and reserve seats there, but well, if you are willing to pay…). The whole space looks like it was made to be photographed and put on social media.

I understand the aesthetics are very important to them, but it wasn’t clear which spaces were “reserved” based on the way things were laid out because nothing was labeled. So in the morning, I worked at a reserved space without realizing it. When I tried to go back to it after the Halloween parade, someone let me know that it was reserved and I couldn’t sit there… even though that entire area was unoccupied.

The front desk receptionists were very nonchalant and barely said anything helpful. They gave me my Wi-Fi passcode and did nothing else to help me get acquainted with the space. It would have been courteous of them to have told me about the reserved spaces at the beginning.

The clientele here… was pretty much all White. I was the diversity of the space for most of the time I was there until I noticed later in the afternoon, a couple of Asian males walked in with their laptops. I also felt like people didn’t “see” me. At least five people walked right into me as though I didn’t even exist, even though I always walked to my right. Only one of those five people actually apologized. It reminded me of the period in 2020 when George Floyd was murdered, and all these Black people on social media started sharing these awful stories of how they felt invisible in the presence of White people. They said White people constantly walked into them as though they did not exist, and some even reported being *SAT* on, on benches in public parks and other public spaces.

It’s crazy to think that a drop-in day rate for this would be $75. You don’t get any guarantee of privacy via a phone booth or a room; there’s no sign-ups or reservations for a phone booth. It’s basically just Wi-Fi, a seat, access to water and coffee, and a bathroom.

I’ll definitely be using this space again in the future when I want to attend school events or pick up early, as it’s a nicer and more comfortable space than other co-working spaces that are in the Gable app nearby. But I still think it leaves something to be desired for the optimal space to work.

No Stupid Questions Podcast: When do you become an adult?

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In the last year or so, I’ve gotten into the No Stupid Questions podcast, which is a spinoff of the very popular Freakonomics books series. Research psychologist Angela Lee Duckworth and tech and sports executive Mike Maughan ask a lot of questions, some that can, at a glance, appear to be “stupid,” and so they ask each other these questions and delve into them. Many of the questions are suggested by their listeners.

The latest one I listened to that made me think was on “When do you become an adult?” and how it’s been fairly arbitrary that 18 has been the designated “adult” age. Why shouldn’t people ages 16 and above be able to vote? Why can you legally drive at age 16, vote at age 18, but then you cannot drink alcohol until age 21 in the U.S.? They go through all these questions and the historical reasons behind them in this episode.

One of the things that really made think was what Duckworth called the “life history theory,” which says that these things that you think are just fixed, or are on some cellular clock, they are actually profoundly influenced by experience. There’s an evolutionary reason behind it: if you sense that you are in some chaotic, uncertain, and/or dangerous environment, you had better get to adulthood fast. “Get to adulthood, reproduce, and get the hell out of there! You don’t have a lot of time!” Duckworth says. Life history theory says: what if you have the sense that you are in a stable, rich environment where you will live years and years? Then you have an incentive to forestall puberty and whatever line you want to give yourself for adult roles. This theory says you can procrastinate on adulthood if you live in a secure world because then, you have time to learn from your parents, get more educated from your peers and develop skills.

This made me think about two individuals I know. One is a former colleague from my last company who was essentially the biggest child I’d ever known who was my age. Let’s call this person Amber. Amber came from a wealthy, prominent Bay Area family with all the resources and support you could ever ask for. Yet somehow, when she started working at my last company, Amber came across as the most needy and insecure 30-something-year-old adult I’d ever met. She was constantly trying to make friends with everyone and get everyone to like her. It was really confusing to me, and I kept my distance from her. But eventually, I found out that she seemed jealous of the role I played in the office. I was effectively the culture queen in the office and organized happy hours and gatherings, and she did not like it since she wanted that role. She tried to get people to call her the “office mom,” as ridiculous as that sounds. Since Amber was the first and only recruiter in our office, she was the land line to HR in our San Francisco headquarters, and she kept tabs on and falsely reported goings-on and “moods” in the office. I will forever and always remember this stupid incident that happened: She had the balls to report me to HR for not wishing her a public happy birthday message on our team Slack channel. Amber knew I had an office birthday list, and when I happened to forget to ask her when her birthday was, she got upset and actually reported me! On top of that, because I had recently co-organized a happy hour event for a departing employee (who left on awkward terms), she also reported me for being “exclusive” and not inviting her (even though 1) another colleague was helping me organize, who she never reported, and 2) I purposely didn’t invite her because I knew she would be out of town for a work-related conference). Instead of HR looking at this as some senseless, childish, and elementary-school-like behavior and dismissing it, they actually took it seriously (since HR at my last company was full of toxic, drama-instigating individuals who substituted activity for achievement every day). Our “People Partner” (what a joke of a title, by the way, as she couldn’t have been less of a “partner” but an trouble maker who abused her “power”) asked my manager to have a chat with me about it. My manager, who was relatively new at the time, seemed a bit helpless when he confronted me about it. It was clear he thought it was dumb, but he shrugged and said he was simply delivering a message that HR had asked him to share with me. In general, people at the office despised Amber; endless people would say she was childish, bratty, and lacked self esteem (one former employee who was on her way out said to me in disgust, “She is a child! She tried to force me to hang out with her after I left!”), but they were generally afraid of Amber since she was like a pseudo HR-representative in our satellite office.

The second person I think about when I think of this life history theory is a friend of mine who is currently on her second divorce. We met in college and connected over our love of Chinese language and culture, food, and travel. Throughout college, I got to meet and hang out with her parents multiple times. They used to visit at least a couple times a year and were so generous to take me out to many delicious meals together. We talked about all sorts of topics that I’d never dream of discussing with my own parents. They treated me and my opinions with respect. I’d never felt so intellectually stimulated by another person’s parents in my life at that point. I always envied her relationship with her parents, and I had wished my parents could be more like hers. My friend married for the first time in 2011, then got divorced around 2015. The guy was literally a clown, as he was a professional clown artist and apparently a bit of an unstable fraud. She got married a second time in 2017 (to someone who, from any outsider’s view, was the total opposite of her, morally and politically), had a kid with this second guy in 2019, and then filed for divorce last year. Somehow, she has dug herself into a hole where she not only gave up her house that she is still paying bills and mortgage payments on, but she is also paying for a Christian private school that she didn’t want her child to go to. Because medical related decisions need both parents to sign off on them, he rejected my friend’s request to get their child therapy for how to handle the divorce. Their child is struggling and hating the separation, and she’s acting out because she doesn’t understand what is going on. Her ex-husband, who is unemployed, is making no attempt to work again given that he’s essentially living for free off my friend’s hard-earned money. She is so short of money now that her grandparents, who are well off, are paying for her rental payments for her apartment that she escaped to.

I wonder about the two of them, though. Is it possible that both of them were so loved, so supported, so coddled by their parents and grandparents and all the money and resources they had, that they are basically like living examples of people who never felt truly compelled to “grow up”? No one wants their children to feel unsupported or unloved, but according to life history theory, we may need to find ways to instill grit in our children so that they do not feel like they have all the time and endless resources in the world to “grow up” and be independent. No one will really respect you when you are in your mid-30s and crying to mommy when someone won’t wish you a happy birthday. Few people will respect you when your grandparents are paying your rent payments as a nearly 40-year-old.

The tech layoffs cycle: a continuation of the “tech-polcalypse,” just closer to home this time

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Once upon a time, in the world that my mom once worked in, people expected to join the workforce and stay at a company for 20-30-plus years. Job security was just a given. Once they hit a certain number of years of employment, they were guaranteed a pension until the day they (or their potential spouse) died. Both my parents were employed by their respective employers for 20-plus years and now are lucky to collect a pension. That world is quite foreign to me, as since before I even entered the workforce full time, I never expected to get any pension at all; in fact, I was repeatedly told that I not only would never get any pension at any job in my lifetime (unless I chose the government route), but I’d even be unlikely to collect any Social Security payments once I turned age 65. How fun for me and my generation!

My mom never experienced endless cycles of layoffs at her company the way I have at all my employers since I started working full time at age 22. My dad did have occasional layoffs based on demand (he worked in the glazing trade), but those layoffs were always temporary, and he’d get his job back once the demand picked up. So when I reflect back on my first job out of college and how I got laid off during the 2008-2009 financial crisis after just nine months of full-time employment, I recall speaking to my dad within an hour of being terminated. I called my dad while sitting on a bench in Union Square here in New York to tell him I was unemployed. And the first words out of his mouth, after a long pause, were, “Well, are they going to hire you back later?” To this, I slowly responded, “I don’t think so, Daddy.”

The only “good” way of losing your job is if you voluntarily quit or leave for whatever is the next step in your life or career. There’s no “good” way of getting laid off or fired. I’ve long debated in my head whether the “rip the bandaid off” situation in the U.S. (which I consider pretty terrible, inhumane, and abrupt, because it IS) with layoffs is better than layoffs that happen in countries like Singapore or France, where the employees have more rights and need far advanced notice. Regardless of which way a layoff happens, it’s always demoralizing for those who are directly impacted and those who remain.

At my current company, we’ve had two layoffs in the entire history of the company’s existence. The first happened in February 2023, when about 10 percent of my colleagues were let go. Just yesterday, we had our second layoff (with a pending restructure), during which about 15% of my teammates were let go. It’s unclear how many people were impacted across the whole company. But it’s been a sad and stressful period even when I haven’t been directly impacted. It’s made me relive the misery of getting laid off in my two prior times. It’s just tiring to always expect a layoff to be right around the corner. It’s exhausting and mentally taxing to always wonder if your job is safe. The “tech-pocalypse” as people are calling it has been pretty terrible the last two years for those who work in the technology industry. Once upon a time, everyone wanted to work in tech, and now, it’s probably one of the worst industries to be in when trying to find your next role. The market is too saturated with those who are unemployed who are in need of jobs. And there probably are not enough roles for all of them. Is this going to be how it will always be during the remainder of my working life: always waiting for the next layoff to drop? This is why working for someone else will always suck, just as my dad always told me.

Juggling working from home and childcare

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For the handful of days we’ve had in between San Francisco, Ottawa/Montreal, and school starting this Thursday at Kaia’s new 3K school, we’ve had to juggle having her at home since we already ended our time (and payment) with the last school. To say the least, this has been pretty challenging and annoying because I never really feel like I can focus on any one thing while she’s around. There’s the tug of work as in, hey, this is actually a working day for me, and I have things to do even outside of my regularly scheduled meetings. Then, there’s Kaia tugging at me because she always wants my attention, even when she’s doing something separate from me. The weather is still very nice outside, so I still want her to go outside to the park or playground, but between Chris and me, we need to tag team and figure out when the best windows are to take her outside. Since Kaia was a baby, she’s always hated it when we’re at our computers and not engaging with her. Now, she gets annoyed and says, “I don’t want Mummy/Daddy to work.” She knows that when we’re working (on our computers), it means we cannot play with her. She’s even tried pushing or hitting my computer in response. Yes, she’s jealous of an inanimate object.

These several days, while they’ve been fleeting, always made me feel a little guilty that my mind wasn’t totally focused on work or her. But it also made me sympathize even more with my friend who we just visited, who works 100 percent from home but also takes care of her son full-time — all at the same time. She gets zero breathing space from childcare because it’s all consuming 24/7. Granted, her work is a lot less meeting heavy than mine is, but I cannot imagine that she’s ever really able to fully focus on work while her son isn’t sleeping/napping. Even when toddlers do independent play, it’s usually in small bursts (or when they’re up to no good and wrecking the house). And they always want to know that you are paying attention to them or engaging with them.

These experiences also make me respect stay-at-home parents even more and how they’re somehow able to do all the childcare work, likely the majority (if not all) the housework and cooking, and still have it all together with themselves. I can barely clean the bathroom with Kaia around. I just don’t how stay-at-home parents do it all and don’t completely lose their minds even without “paid work.” Stay-at-home parents definitely do not get the credit or respect that they truly deserve. When you think about it, when there’s a stay-at-home parent, they pretty much never get a break. The parent who does “paid work” outside of the home gets an actual separate space to be an adult, do adult things/have adult conversations, and do something completely not child-related. They have the mental and physical space to separate family from work. Stay-at-home parents do not have that luxury when it comes to separating childcare, child’s learning, housework, cooking, grocery shopping, etc.

Shame on us as a society and world.

Team offsite, bonding at dinner, and discussing poop amongst other parents of littles

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Today was day one of two of our strategic team offsite. The last time I had a team offsite was two years ago, also in San Francisco, but with our wider customer success team. This offsite was a much smaller, tighter-knit group, more cross-functional… and a bit more “all business.” As much as I like this current team, it’s clear we don’t have the same “magic” and camaraderie as our wider customer success team did. One of our sales leaders knows an owner of an Italian restaurant called Pazzia SF, so he was not only able to get a good rate for our large group, but also a private dining space complete with its own large bar, fireplace, and comfy couches.

The sad thing we found out when we arrived at the restaurant was that they actually got robbed earlier this morning. A few guys had thrown massive rocks into their front floor-to-ceiling windows and stolen a bunch of their restaurant supplies and furniture. The owner almost wanted to shut the place down for the day to recuperate, but he said he couldn’t do that to our large group. So, it ended up being business as usual, luckily for us. The meal was delicious, with perfectly mixed cocktails, good wine, and delicious pizza, pastas, proteins, and salads. The family-sized serving of tiramisu was satisfying, but ever since that incredible and ethereal tiramisu we had during our last dinner in Buenos Aires, the one at Pazzia really couldn’t hold a candle to it.

I had a lot of fun conversations at dinner with my colleagues. It reminds me of all the laughter-filled and stimulating conversation and banter I used to have while working full time in an office. It also made me think about how luxurious it felt to have conversations with other adults and not have to worry about my toddler eating, running around, or breaking things. Chris and Kaia were having dinner at the hotel lounge at the time of my team dinner. While catching up with a team member, who asked me how Kaia was doing, I quickly looked at my phone after it buzzed to see that Chris had sent me two photos: one of a wide-smiling Kaia, standing by her little potty with a big lump of poop in it, and a second photo of just the little potty with her huge, adult-sized poop. That’s what happens when you are backed up, I suppose, even as a tiny human.

I responded, “Things are going well! We’re potty training now, and Chris just sent me a photo of Kaia with a big poop in her potty. Pretty sure you don’t want to see that.”

I will say that despite a fear of pooping in the potty, now being in week three of potty training, I’m quite proud of how far Kaia has come. Just over two weeks ago, she was running around in diapers and being cleaned up on a changing pad. Now, Kaia is self-initiating pee and had very few pee accidents. She tells us when she has to go, and when there’s not a suitable (haha, clean enough) potty for her to use, she very maturely holds the pee in and waits to go. When we had to put a diaper on her for our in-transit time on the plane, she said she didn’t even want to wear the diaper. Our sweet baby is growing and maturing so quickly, even with this one milestone activity (or process, really). Soon, diapers will be a distant memory for all of us, and she won’t even remember what it feels like to have her butt wiped by one of us.

Meeting visiting colleagues in person

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It’s hard to believe, but it’s been over four years of working 100 percent remotely. The pandemic started here in New York in March 2020. I accepted my first 100 percent remote job in late August 2020, starting the last week of September that year. So for over four years, my face-to-face interaction with colleagues has been rare, mostly confined to “seeing” each other via Zoom rectangles on my external computer monitor. I adapted to it pretty quickly since I didn’t really have a choice back then, but to think that now it’s not my “new normal” but rather my “everyday normal” is a bit odd to admit out loud. It’s been over four years of not going into an office regularly, not doing work travel via plane regularly, and not having everyday, casual catch ups and small talk in person with work people.

So when my colleague who is based in Paris, France, told me that he would be here in New York for his wife’s work retreat this week and asked if I’d be free to meet, of course, I said yes. I blocked my calendar for this morning, hopped on the train like a wannabe daily New York City commuter, and took the subway downtown to meet him at Bourke Street Bakery, near where he’d have his next scheduled catch-up. I needed a place that a) had good coffee and b) decently okay-for-Manhattan seating so that I wouldn’t have to worry about fighting anyone for. a table. Bourke Street delivered on both.

I wasn’t sure what we would talk about or how we would get along, but I figured I could use the in-person socialization time since I get so little of it nowadays. We’d only been on two Zoom calls previously, almost completely just about work with very little small talk. We’d had a few Slack communications, and that was really it. But we actually got along pretty well, especially once we started talking about travel, different places in the world, and life in New York vs. Paris. He’s originally from the south of France in a small town near Cannes. His background before tech was quite eclectic and interesting (especially to me, ha): he used to live in Beijing working for a wine business in the mid 2000’s, left after 1.5 years, then came to New York to work in the restaurant industry; then he went back to Paris, worked in the restaurant industry again, and then somehow got suggested for a software sales job and never looked back. To this day, he still has many friends, mostly French, who work in the restaurant industry both here and in Paris, and thus has great connections to get the most sought-after restaurant reservations (he generously offered to show me and my family around next time I’m in Paris, and to get me hooked up with the best restaurant bookings). He gave me some tips for French restaurants in New York and also told me about some of the restaurants he had lined up for him and his wife to go to during their short stay here this time around. It was an hour that was enjoyable and well spent.

After we finished our coffee catch up, he walked me to the train station and we bid each other adieu. And on the short train ride home, I thought about how much I really miss these casual, non-work-related colleague catch-ups. I was really glad I didn’t make up some lame excuse and not meet him; laziness doesn’t have any benefits. Being alone in front of my computer most of the day can really suck. At least I can multi-task with things at home, which is a huge plus when you’ve got a little one in your life. But the social aspect of work is probably what I miss the most about pre-pandemic in-office life (the free printing and office supplies were also a huge bonus, too!). These types of daily social interaction used to be a part of my everyday routine, whether it was random conversation in the office kitchen or hallway, or during a coffee/tea break close to the office. The Zoom fatigue is real. It’s much harder to “connect” with people on a screen than it is face-to-face. Plus, I can’t really blame colleagues who don’t want to do “fun” catch-ups that frequently over Zoom. We would all rather it be in person, and who wants yet another Zoom meeting?!

Workplace appreciation: holiday gifts

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Two nights ago, I was getting ready for my nightly candle and reading time before bed when I was going through my small candle collection. I came across a candle that was gifted to me by my former boss at my current company (she’s still at the company, and we still chat all the time). It was a soy candle with a pleasant floral fragrance. I remember it came as part of a larger gift set that she sent as a holiday gift just over two years ago, created by a company that is women-owned and run (of course, she would have the forethought to research this before choosing team holiday gifts). It arrived beautifully packaged with a heartfelt card she sent to thank me for all my hard work over the last year. I also remember I was on maternity leave when I received the gift.

A lot of people in general take for granted corporate gifts and holiday gifts; they’re just things that are given and done as a generic token of appreciation. But since I started at my current company, it suddenly dawned on me that for my entire career to date, which spans five different companies, that my current company is the only company I’ve ever worked for that did company-sponsored holiday gifts for employees. It’s the only company that thought that giving a token of appreciation at the end of year to employees was valued and necessary, and so the expense was deemed worth it. Two companies ago, when I was a manager, I became a manager in my third year at the company. In that year, management decided that managers would be responsible for choosing team gifts for everyone on their teams during the holiday season. The catch? The managers of the teams were responsible for paying for the gifts out of their own pockets, so I had to pool money with the two other managers on my team to buy gifts for my direct reports. I don’t remember how much I was forced to pay out of pocket, but it was at least $110-150. That’s on top of any holiday/Christmas gifts I spent on my own family and friends that year. And it was not fun. Why should individual managers be responsible for paying for holiday gifts on behalf of the company when the employer is too cheap to foot the bill for these things? The individual contributors aren’t working for the managers; they’re working for the company.

So I lit the candle that was gifted to me by my former boss that night and gave thanks for working at a company that values its employees and shows it through these gifts. I’ve gotten a lot of gifts while working here, not just during the holiday season, and I’ve never taken any of them for granted. I have a lot to be thankful for where I currently work. There are so many terrible companies that don’t value their employees out there and do nothing to give thanks for their hard work. I’ve worked for many of them. And these companies all need to go evolve or die.

Kindness: often appreciated, not often duplicated enough

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I was on a work call earlier this week with a customer who I was meeting for the very first time. He actually let me know that he was leaving the company in two weeks, but not by his own choice. The company was going through a reduction-in-force (RIF), aka a layoff, and unfortunately, he was one of the unlucky “chosen” ones. He had been at the company for over 40 years and never worked anywhere else; he said he wasn’t sure what his next steps were going to be and who would want to hire someone at his age. We spoke a bit about that and I shared my concern and tried to wish him the best.

“Yvonne, I’ve just met you, but you have really made my day,” he said. “I really mean it. Not to say that people at your company aren’t kind, but you are incredibly kind, and I will remember your kindness. I feel like even though I just met you, we already really know each other. It’s really going to help me get through the day and my remaining days here.”

It’s so easy to be kind and supportive, whether it’s for a second or a minute, whether it’s leaving a door open for someone, helping someone with something they’ve dropped on the street, or even saying a few supportive words in a time of vulnerability. Not everyone does this, though, because they think it’s “an extra effort,” an inconvenience, or just won’t be received well. But when this man said this to me, I could tell he really meant what he said. We’re essentially strangers on a video call who will unlikely ever meet each other in person, yet he said my words really helped him. Sometimes, it really is the small gestures that we perform that stay with people. And they really are worth the extra effort or seconds it takes us to do them. As much negativity is shared on social media and in the news, I feel like almost every day, someone random on the street, all strangers, does kind things for me, whether it’s a little smile, making extra space for me in a crowded elevator, playing peek-a-boo with Kaia to get her to cheer up in the midst of a tantrum on the train, or assisting me with the door at the daycare when I’m struggling to keep the door open while also getting the stroller in/out (and they’re just a passerby, not even someone trying to get in/out of the school!).

Kindness is its own circular economy, one that each of us needs to contribute to in order to create a better world for us all.

New work laptop excitement

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At my company, I’m allowed to request a new computer every three years. Given that I have already been at my company for 3.5 years, I decided to put in the request and specify that I no longer wanted a Macbook Air, but rather a Macbook Pro. Although the Air is great because it’s extremely lightweight and easy to carry around, I actually hated using it. Once I had anything more than Chrome, Safari, and Slack running at the same time, the entire machine would run really slowly. If I had Excel running at the same time, the fan would go on overdrive. And don’t even get me started when I had to start using Microsoft Teams more frequently this past year due to customers who can only use Teams for video calls. It was like my computer was about to croak one last time before exploding on me.

So I had the new laptop shipped to me last week, and I spent some time today adding all my necessary applications and files on, as well as configuring it exactly as I’d like. I LOVE this computer. I cannot even believe how much I like it. I don’t really keep track of the latest updates to Apple products and other technology the way a lot of people in my industry do because I can’t really be bothered, but the updates to this computer are incredible. Yes, it’s a bit heavier than the Air, but it doesn’t get mad at me when I have Microsoft Teams running; no fan is screaming at me. And the best part about this new version of the Macbook is that it has a touch button so that I don’t constantly have to type in all my passwords all the time. This is amazing!

On the downside, as soon as I came back from Denver and tried to use my 3+ year old wireless head set, it decided to die on me. So now I need to find a new head set that I don’t hate to go with this new Macbook Pro!