The first was simple enough — a woman asking if anyone in San Francisco has actually met a decent person without an app. "Give a girl some hope," she wrote. "Where did you meet your significant other in this silly tech city?" Fair question. The apps feel increasingly like slot machines designed to keep you pulling the lever, not actually connecting.

But the second post stopped us in our tracks.

A 39-year-old woman — Army veteran, diesel mechanic, ecologist with multiple graduate degrees from Johns Hopkins — shared that she's on the spectrum and recently had to pivot from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to software engineering after federal funding for environmental programs dried up. She described years spent alone in nature, studying ecosystems, writing research papers. Now she needs to learn how to navigate open offices and stand-ups and small talk. She was looking for patient people to practice socializing with over boba.

Her post was disarmingly honest: "People are kind of… scary." She wears earplugs and sunglasses because the sensory world is harsh. She's learning Mandarin in her free time. She covered her Southern accent so Bay Area people would take her seriously. She described herself as a "Jill-of-all-Trades" who never stops.

One local gently noted: "Baby, you don't need to put your IQ." Which — fair. But also? The whole post radiated the energy of someone who's spent a lifetime proving she belongs.

The response was genuinely heartwarming. A former ecologist now working in tech offered to hang out. Others suggested tabletop gaming groups and neurodivergent meetups. One person recommended contacting hospital social workers to find occupational therapists who specialize in adult autism — apparently a near-impossible resource to locate in Northern California.

Here's what struck us: this woman didn't lose her job because she was bad at it. She lost it because the federal government decided her work wasn't worth funding anymore. So she taught herself to code, landed an apprenticeship, and is now methodically addressing the one skill gap she can identify — talking to humans.

That's not a failure story. That's the most fiscally responsible, personally accountable, pull-yourself-up response to government dysfunction we've seen in a long time. No one asked for a bailout. No one demanded a program. She just posted on the internet and asked strangers to get boba.

If the Bay Area can't make room for someone like that, we deserve every "tech bro hellscape" joke we get.