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Hi! Welcome to The Friday Fix! You’re reading this because you probably stumbled upon this post somewhere on the internet instead of where it should be—in your inbox. But no worries; we can fix that.
Who am I? I’m Shem Opolot, a health professional turned content creator, passionate about helping people be their best selves in life and work.
Why should you subscribe?
I have over ten years of work experience in healthcare, program management, and data analytics on two continents. So, I know a little about helping you work smarter
I comb through tonnes of self-improvement content so you don’t have to, and I distill the content into bite-sized wisdom for you
I’ll occasionally make you laugh
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Hi! I'm Shem Opolot, and this is The Friday Fix, my weekly newsletter. If you've received it, you’re either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you. If you fit into the latter (yes, I’m the kind of person who uses words like “latter”) camp and want to subscribe, then click on the shiny button below:
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HAPPY FRIDAY 🎉 What’s the largest number between one and a million that doesn’t contain the letter ’T’ in it?
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LIFE
Coincidink
What are the chances?
In July last year, Pablo, my Haitian American friend, hired me to manage a project for a client. Because of my knowledge of healthcare and data, I was a translator between the client and two young, talented data scientists. The project was fully remote, and I never met any of the people on the project in person. Not the client. Not the two data scientists I spoke to daily for 5 months.
“Hello?! [unintelligible words]”
“I’m having trouble hearing you.”
“I’m boardi….on…train…Can you hear me now?” Their choppy audio, as usual, only delivered the questions about their audibility clearly. Nothing else.
“This sh… be…better. Can you hear me now? It should be better now.”
“Yes. Yes. I can hear you.”
“Great. I’ll go ahead and share my screen.”
“Caaaaan youuuuuu seeeee my screeeeennn now?” the soft-spoken lady asked slowly, her speech hampered by the attempt to multitask.
“Yes!”
“Okay, great. Sorry. This dashboard…”
I developed a bit of a friendship with the two data scientists whose faces, enclosed in a Zoom rectangle with similar backgrounds, were a permanent fixture on my laptop desktop. Even though we spoke often, all I knew about them was that they were damn good at their jobs, always requested a day more than they needed as a buffer, and had thick Indian accents. It was a woman and a man. The woman’s American accent was better and she joked a lot more. The guy was a bit more square, but fun once you pushed the right buttons.
After four months, we concluded the project, and I didn’t hear from them again.
A year later, Pablo invited me to a happy hour event for people affiliated with the company. The event was at a pier bar right on the water. I had trouble finding it at first, but the sound of Afrobeats in the distance guided me.
I walked into a full house, panicked, and walked straight to the first familiar face I saw—Pablo’s wife. The company is named after her, by the way. She stood next to a table in the back with a martini in hand. As she greeted me, she used her teeth to pull an impaled olive off the toothpick from her glass.
Across the same table, I recognized a short Indian man with glasses, a gold necklace, and a full beard trimmed close to his skin.
“Jay?”
“Shem?!”
After exchanging inquiring squints, our eyes widened with recognition. Jay was the male data scientist I worked with. We were so happy to see each other that we immediately dove into conversation, stumbling through the generics in no meaningful order, but with undeniable excitement.
“Do you live in D.C.?” “How long has it been?!” “Did you drive here?” “I thought you’d be older.” “I thought you’d be taller.”
I learned that Jay moved to D.C. from India a few years back and started working for the company after meeting Pablo at a similar company event.
The soft voice of a young lady in a heated conversation behind us interrupted our flow. Jay lifted his eyes above my gaze temporarily and looked behind me at her. He smiled warmly, if briefly, before looking back at me. I couldn’t make out what that was about at the time.
“Oh my gosh, yeeess! That always happened every time we tried to build dashboards with Looker,” I eavesdropped involuntarily.
I refocused on Jay briefly, but it was the way she said “dashboards.” I’d heard that before.
“The dashboards eventually turned out fine once we switched the software and streamlined the extraction process.”
“Who talks about dashboards at happy hour?” I thought to myself. But then it hit me:
The train. The poor connection on the Zoom call. The slow speech during the screen share.
I turned around in my seat at once.
“Divya?”
“Shem?!”
She abandoned her dashboard talk and pulled up a chair at our table. At this point, another person who was also happy to meet Jay for the first time grabbed his attention, so I caught up with Divya. As with Jay, we tried to compress everything into this atom of time with no coherence whatsoever.
“How old are you?! You look like you’re 12!” “I thought you’d be much older.” “Have you been in D.C. this whole time?” “I’m 26!” “I’ve been in and out, but mostly, yes.”
I learned that Divya also moved to D.C. for her bachelor’s and started at the company shortly after.
What are the chances?
“I’m going to grab a drink, do you want anything, Shem?” Jay said, getting up and freeing himself from a conversation on life support.
“Sparkling water, please.”
“You know the drinks are on the house until 8, right?”
“Tequila club soda, please!”
Like someone trying to carry a grocery haul in one trip, Jay returned with my drink, his drink, a club soda, and—unprompted—what looked like a second glass of red wine for Divya. He rejoined us, and I reiterated how happy I was to meet them.
“So, what do you guys do for fun?” I asked them both, staring at Jay first and urging him with my eyes to go first.
“Nothing much. We like to take walks and go hiking, watch movies, go to bars. You know, normal stuff.”
I like going dancing, but Jay doesn’t much care for that,” Divya interjected, glancing briefly and coyly at Jay.
“When you say dancing, you mean…?” I made the gods of small talk proud.
“Salsa, hip-hop, dancehall, any sort of dance. I love to learn and get into it. It’s a great workout, too.”
“DIVYAAA! WHERE’S YOUR RING?!” A clearly drunk, unnamed gentleman with a bushy beard, shades, an all-white linen outfit, and a thick Caribbean accent interrupted. He grabbed tiny Divya by the hand, pointing at her ring finger, while staring at Jay. I had no idea what was going on, but the three of them seemed to be in on it, so I registered that and took the opportunity to pile some finger food on my small plate and take liberal sips of my free drink.
Divya, blushing from embarrassment, reclaimed her seat next to me. Jay reclaimed his across from both of us. The sun was setting behind us, so every time Jay moved his neck, the light bounced off his gold necklace and blinded me.
“What was that about?” I pried.
“Well, you know Jay and I are dating…” she said, looking at me, and then quickly looking back at her fidgety fingers and smiling.
“James was the first to figure it out in the office, so he likes to tease us.”
“WHAT?!?!”
I looked at Jay. He smiled and looked away. His chain blinded me again.
Looking back, Jay and Divya always had the same Zoom background, and it wasn’t one of those fake ones that come out of the box. When Divya asked Jay to do something, it often sounded like they were in the same room. I just assumed that room was in the office.
Dear reader, an office, it was not.
Divya and Jay are both from India. They belong to different castes. They met in high school in India and started dating. They applied to colleges in America separately, but around the same time. Both were accepted into several colleges in America, but they both picked GW in D.C. They both got scholarships and enrolled. Divya started working with the company first and she was the one who invited Jay for a company event like the one we were at. Jay met Pablo at that event and was hired a few months later.
Almost a year ago, the entire time we worked on the project, not only were they dating, but they were also living together. They had the same Zoom background, the same internet, and the same phone plan.
What are the chances?
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THINGS
A quote
Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious; both are disappointed.
An article
A picture
It was a happy hour at Happy Hour and my friend captured me goofing around.
WORK
The purge
If you’re warm blooded and use Google products (Gmail, Drive, and Photos), you probably have storage issues. You might be beyond saving, but if you want to free yourself from Google’s endless rent-seeking, I recommend at least two things:
Buy an external hard drive with at least 1 TB of storage space. A good one will run you about $100. I know, I know, but trust me. It’s worth it. Especially if you’re paying Google for storage yearly. With the hard drive, you must perform a storage audit: go through your Google Drive and delete everything you don’t need anymore, and back up everything else (it’s usually pictures and videos) on the hard drive. This process is painful, but if you do it well, you only need to do it once. Part of this audit involves creating a system for handling any new content. Decide what’s worth saving and where you want to save it. Once a quarter, you can move [your newly organized] stuff onto the hard drive. This is one of those things where present you takes care of future you.
A good place to start in the purge is here: drive.google.com/drive/quota. You’ll see the files consuming the most space and decide if you want to keep them or delete them. Sometimes the large files aren’t even yours. An email from someone else with large attachments also takes up your storage.
Your drive could look like mine 😉.
PRODUCTS
A course
A guide
FUN
The Friday Fix playlist
Your picks
> A daily game to improve your spelling
> This site tells you where you can go with your passport
> The world’s largest whale graveyard
Have a great weekend,
— SO
