Page 58 of Caught A Vibe

“Oh no! From who?” I ask.

“Hayley Prescott.”

The other shoe drops like a ton of bricks. Hayley Prescott. The famously sex-positive singer. The person we hoped to approach at a later date for a celebrity endorsement.

“What did she say?” I scramble to pull up her InstaSnap account. This is bad. This is so bad!

Like she can read my mind, Nicola replies. “It’s not all bad. She talks about how great the orgasm was but that it was hard to use and had a steep learning curve. She criticized the appearance too, saying it looked a little too industrial.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake. It’s a machine.” I’m still reeling from losing Hayley’s potential support, and hearing that my design isn’t visually pleasing pours salt in the wound.

“Yeah, but we’re not marketing to Comic Con. According to her and the comments section, a lot of women don’t want to have sex with a machine. They want a toy that more closely simulates the real thing without reminding them it’s not the real thing.”

“Well, the real thing can’t suck your clit and hit your G-spot with a dick at the same time, so…” I snap.

“I know. Just the messenger here.”

I shouldn’t bark at Nic. She’s right. This isn’t her fault. It’s my responsibility to fix. I have to find a bright side. Something we can rally around. “Okay, this is just one bad review…”

Nicola coughs.

“Actually, a full twenty-five percent of the reviews we’ve been tagged in have mentioned the user experience being tricky. We just ran the analysis today.”

I cover my eyes with my hand and through sheer dint of will manage not to cry. Big girl CEOs don’t cry over bad reviews. I need to keep it together right now.

“Can you or Emmie reach out to those folks specifically with a detailed survey? Thank them for their time and feedback, but dig into what was so hard to figure out? We’ve got to get ahead of this before we ship these new units out.”

“You got it, boss. It’s going to be okay.” Nic knows I hate when my friends call me boss, so of course she does it at every opportunity to rib me.

I hang up and drop my head to my desk, barely resisting banging it hard against the glass surface. Nicola’s last word echoes in my corner office. Boss. I am the boss. The success and failure of this dream rests squarely on my shoulders, and I feel every pound of it. Not to mention the fact that I’ve linked my best friends’ careers to this crapshoot.

My phone rings again, and I answer without opening my eyes or lifting my head. “What now?”

“Penny? Are you okay?” Not Emmie or Nic following up. Dash’s deep voice tickles my ear and makes me actively wish I was back home, curled up in bed, little spoon to his big spoon.

“I’m fine. Just got some bad reviews. We’ll get through it.”

“I was calling to see if I could order you anything for dinner.”

“What, you’re not cooking?” I tease.

“Ha ha. No brain-melting stir-fry tonight. Sorry to disappoint. I was thinking pizza?”

“Mmm, with cheesy garlic bread and a Caesar salad?”

“You got it. Hang in there, babe. I’ll see you soon.”

I square my shoulders and draw in a deep breath. So we had a few bad reviews. Fine. It happens. What doesn’t happen every day is stumbling across a guy who will order me dinner because I’m having a crappy day. Or who wakes me up with kisses along my neck because he knows it drives me wild. Or who can right my day with a thirty-second phone call.

With my mental train wreck sidetracked, I regain a little perspective. A little positive momentum.

I email Nic for the report she put together, but get impatient waiting and dive right into the raw data. I read the negative reviews in question and start a spreadsheet to track the common complaints. I read the positive ones to remind myself that it is working for a majority of users. I go through the packaging and onboarding materials we shipped out with the preorders and look for improvements. I whiteboard some ideas for changes to present to the team tomorrow. I look at our competitors’ packaging and user manuals, and judge ours far superior. Where is the disconnect?

If anyone is going to find it, it’s going to be me.

After all, I designed the thing, and I’m the one who convinced everybody to follow me out here on this ledge to launch it. When things go wrong, I should be the one to fix it.

It works wonderfully for me, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned in this industry, it’s that I always have more to learn about people’s sexual experiences and their relationships with their bodies. I’ve done my best to make the MiO accessible for everyone, but clearly something is off.

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