On my second day at clips.com, I had accidentally replaced the homepage with my uncle singing karaoke. On my third day, I found out.
I got to the old mattress warehouse at six fifty-two. I had never seen it before eight. The lobby lights were still on their night setting, a dim blue that made the slogan on the wall look like a threat. Thirty Seconds of Everything.
There were already eleven people in Firm. Firm holds six.
Desmond was standing at the whiteboard with a marker in each hand. His seed jar was empty. The shell jar was full. I had known him for two days, and I already understood that this was a very bad sign.
On the wall screen, clips.com was open. The Clip of the Day filled it edge to edge. A man in a brown corduroy blazer stood under a pink spotlight, eyes closed, reaching for a note.
The play button was in exactly the right place. I noticed that. I am not proud that I noticed that.
"June," Desmond said. "Sit down. You're not in trouble."
"Am I in trouble?"
"I don't know yet. That's different."
The view counter under my uncle said 40,118,262. As I watched, it said 40,121,907.
"How long has it been up?" I asked.
"Fourteen hours," said a woman at the end of the table. "Since three-oh-six yesterday afternoon."
She was Pilar Okonjo-Reyes, thirty-three, the overnight on-call engineer.
She had a hoodie with the hood up and a tablet with forty open tabs. I would learn later that she assumed every unusual event was a marketing campaign. She had once assumed a power outage was a marketing campaign. To be fair, marketing had tweeted about it.
"I got the first alert at four," Pilar said. "Traffic up three hundred percent.
"I checked the homepage. I saw a man singing. I thought, okay, marketing's doing a thing."
"Marketing was not doing a thing," said a man from marketing.
"I know that now, Gil."
"Why didn't you roll it back?" Desmond asked her.
"Because at five, traffic was up nine hundred percent." She turned her tablet around. "At six it was up two thousand.
"You don't roll back a thing that's doing that. You call someone. I called you. You were asleep."
"I was asleep for forty minutes."
"You were asleep for forty very important minutes."
Desmond wrote INCIDENT-4471 at the top of the whiteboard. Underneath it he wrote ROOT CAUSE, and underneath that he drew a box. He looked at the box for a while.
"Everything is a config problem," he said, mostly to the box. "Somewhere there's a value that's wrong."
"The value is my uncle," I said.
Every head in Firm turned toward me.
I explained the padding bug and the staging slot. I explained the twenty-eight seconds from the Copper Kettle, and the dropdown that said prod. I told them I'd thought it meant the product team. Somebody near the window made a noise like a slow leak.
"And Shipwright asked if you were sure," Desmond said.
"It always asks," I said. "Page twelve."
He closed his eyes. For a moment, he looked exactly like my uncle at the bridge.
"Page twelve," he agreed. "I wrote page twelve."
There is a question I have been asked many times since. People want to know why forty million people watched a sixty-one-year-old bus mechanic sing a song nobody remembered. I have a theory, and it is mostly about the last frame.
The clip stops on the key change. It doesn't show whether he lands it.
You see him close his eyes, take the breath, open his mouth, and then nothing. The video loops. You watch it again to find out. You never find out.
By seven-fifteen, the internet had named it. The comment section had a word for it. They called it "the climb."
People were filming themselves watching it. They filmed their own tense faces in the second before the key change, and posted those on clips.com too.
There was a nurse in a break room. There was a crossing guard. There was a man on a fishing boat who held up his phone to the ocean, like the ocean should see this.
Pilar scrolled through the reaction clips on the big screen. "Four hundred thousand of these," she said. "Since midnight. Our uploads are up six times."
"Is that good?" I asked.
"It's the best night clips.com has ever had," she said. "In sixteen years."
"So it's good."
"It's an incident," Desmond said. "It's a very successful incident. Those are the worst kind. Nobody learns anything from them."
At seven-forty, the Clip of the Day committee arrived. All four of them came in together, holding coffees, like a band arriving for a funeral.
They were led by a man named Rudy Vance, fifty-eight, who had chosen the Clip of the Day for eleven years. He wore a lanyard covered in enamel pins of dogs. Every pin was a dog that had won.
He looked at the screen for a long time.
"That," he said finally, "is not a dog."
"No," Desmond said.
"We had a dog scheduled. A beagle in a raincoat. It tested very well."
Rudy turned to me. "Are you the intern?"
"Yes, sir."
"Is he your dog?"
"He's my uncle."
Rudy studied the view counter. It ticked past forty-one million. He took off his lanyard, looked at the pins, and put it back on, slowly.
"The beagle," he said, "had a good run."
At eight o'clock I called my uncle. He picked up on the first ring, which he never does. He usually lets it ring four times so the caller knows he's busy.
"June," he said. "There is a lady at the bakery."
"I know. You texted."
"She says I'm on the internet. I told her that's not possible. I don't own the internet. I have a flip phone."
"You're on a website, Uncle Teo. It's called clips.com."
There was a long pause. In the background I could hear a radio and a kettle.
"Is that the barbershop on Delancey?"
"No. That's Clips. With no dot com. This is a video site."
"Ah." Another pause. "Am I in trouble?"
"No," I said. "I think I am."
"Did they see the key change?"
"Forty million people saw the key change."
He was quiet for a long time. Then he said, very softly, "Did I land it?"
I looked at the screen. The clip looped. He reached. It stopped.
"They don't know," I said. "That's sort of the whole thing."
"Huh," said my uncle. I could hear him smiling. He has a smile you can hear, like a bus pulling into a stop. "Then I'll have to tell them."
At eight-thirty, Desmond pulled me into Plush, which was smaller than Firm and had a beanbag nobody trusted. He closed the door.
"Here's what's going to happen," he said. "We're going to take your uncle down."
"Okay."
"Gently. We'll put up a normal Clip of the Day. A dog, probably.
"We'll write a postmortem. You'll be in it. I'll be in it. Page twelve will be in it."
He cracked his knuckles, because he was out of seeds. "And then we'll fix the dropdown, and everyone will forget."
"Forty million people will forget?"
"Forty million people forget things every day. It's the only thing the internet is reliably good at."
It was a reasonable plan. I agreed with all of it. I felt sick, and relieved, and very aware that I was twenty-four and had been employed for fifty hours.
Then Desmond's laptop chimed.
He looked at it. I watched his face move from neutral to a place I hadn't seen it go. It was the face of a man reading a value in a config file he did not expect to find.
"What?" I said.
He turned the screen toward me.
The message was from Harriet Vosk. In nine years, Desmond told me later, she had messaged him directly three times. Two of those had been "What's the retention?"
This one was longer.
"Do not take the man down. Who is he? I want to meet him today. Bring the intern."
Up next: What's the Retention?
Continue to Part 3 →