One More Thing by B. J. Novak

important topics—was only interesting to people as a setup to the punch line that followed. On this point, I believe that all of society had its values completely wrong. I feel entitled to say this since all of society has since made the same accusation about me.
    I will state my defense quickly right now—I want to get this out of the way so I can tell the rest of the story. It won’t take long. It is a one-point defense.
    1. What if I had discovered what had happened and reacted in the exact opposite manner? In other words: what if instead of returning a sex robot who had fallen in love with me, I had gone in the other direction—professed my love to her as well, announced to the world that I was in love with a sex robot, that I was seriously dating a sex robot, that a sex robot loved me and I loved it back, that I was marrying a sex robot, and the whole world was invited to the wedding? What if that was what Brian Williams had announced? Would that really have been so much better?
    Or is it possible that I did the most rational, correct thing that a person with a strong sense of self and, yes, romance, would do in a situation like this and that people are simply going to find the situation funny no matter what?
    That’s all.
    The late-night talk show hosts, the cable comedians—good for them. It was their job to make fun of me, and they did it well. But everyone made the joke well. Everyone could get the same laugh by saying my name, and so everyone said it. I’m sure you did it yourself. I wouldn’t blame you. If I were you, I probably would have, too.
    In drawings and in TV comedy sketches, I became a well-known caricature, with my once painfully average-looking face exaggerated a tiny bit more each time, each parody cribbingfrom the previous one and building on it, until the predominant cartoon image of me was something so familiar that I could recognize it as myself, out of the corner of my eye across a room, just as quickly as you would recognize yourself in a family photograph that had hung on the wall of the house you grew up in.
    Even the more supposedly “intelligent” jokes repeated themselves endlessly, just to remind you how overwhelmingly prevalent this type of joke became. For example, a common political cartoon to illustrate the naïveté of politicians was to draw them on dates with me. I must have been sent a variation of this idea by a well-meaning friend, trying to gently filter my fame for me, at least five or six separate times, with the president or a governor or mayor thinking,
I think this is really getting somewhere!
and on the opposite side of the table is me.
    The guy who bought the first robot capable of love and handed it back. The guy who came across the greatest discovery in the history of science—and returned it, because his sex robot was crying.
    Did I get what was so funny about it? Of course.
    Did it hurt? Of course.
    This is what led to the one thing I regret: that I let myself start thinking of myself this way. I knew the truth, somewhere: I knew that I was, in my heart, as I said at the beginning, a romantic, and that that was actually what had led to all this, and that the events that followed were certainly funny, and embarrassing, but they weren’t the result of any deeply wrong or evil decision making.
    But I couldn’t help but absorb what people said about me. And it weakened me. It was just so,
so
much easier to believe that everyone else was just basically right, and I was just basicallywrong, than to keep fighting it all the time. I kept defending myself out loud, but in my mind, little by little, I let myself start to go along with all of it and believe I was just kind of vaguely a bad guy, just because it was easier. Just because,
come on
.
    That is my own fault, my own weakness, and it is what led to the one thing I did do wrong.
    When I got word from the laboratory that Sophia still was in love with me, and they asked if I would be willing to visit her so they