All Eyes On Her. Poonam Sharma

brownies laid out for guests to nibble on in the plush pretreatment waiting room. Four warm brownies, three glasses of Vueve, and two blissful hours of cleansing, scrubbing, rubbing, buffing, paraffining and polishing later, I was reborn.

      The cosmetologist did such a fantastic job with my eyebrows that I couldn’t help but admire them via the mirrored double doors of Steel’s elevators on my ride up that Monday morning. Unfortunately, the doors opened to reveal a far less pleasing image. Stefanie’s beaming smile sent my defense mechanisms into overdrive. I furrowed my brow and clutched my shoulder bag a little closer to my heart, as if it were bulletproof. Maybe she was just delighted to detect my period-induced pimple, I told myself. And maybe, one of these days, I would wake up and decide that rather than fighting, I was ready to age gracefully.

      Not likely. Stepping off of the elevator, I remembered the problem about logging on to my computer, and headed straight for the IT help desk.

      “Hey, Monica,” said some twenty-three-year-old in a singsong voice who I was sure I had never seen before in my life. He stood up to greet me. Judging by his arching eyebrow, I assumed he thought he was flirting. I reminded myself that I was just cranky because of my period, and resisted the urge to tell him that he would have to be at least this old to ride this ride.

      That might sound harsh, but I’m telling you, he probably didn’t even shave yet.

      “Hey…you.” I tried a smile, wondering who he was meant to be conspiring with, and hoping that I hadn’t gotten to know him a little too well at that Cinco De Mayo Company Happy Hour during which there was still an hour I couldn’t account for.

      “We were expecting to see you earlier this morning,” he said, seated again, tapping a few strokes onto his computer and then tilting the screen toward me. “We have never seen anyone try so hard to sneak onto the system using an actual login name. The password automatically resets after fifteen failed attempts when you’re outside the office.”

      “But I came in on Sunday to work and couldn’t get into my computer,” I said. “I didn’t log on remotely at all this weekend.”

      “Well, someone tried to.” He laced his fingers together behind his head, as if he were in charge of IT for NASA. “But no worries, we’ve reset your login to your direct phone number, and your password to Sphinx. We thought vgupta was a little too obvious. You can go into the system now and reset both the login and password to whatever you want. But you might want to be careful about who you tell even your login name to in the future.”