- Back at work on Monday, things are hectic at the Circle. There's a huge backlog of customer questions that need to be answered stat, and Mae is kept busy at her desk all morning.
- Eventually, Mae gives herself a 20-minute lunch break and meets up with Francis Garaventa at the campus's Glass Eatery.
- Because Mae doesn't have long to eat, she scarfs down her burrito while Francis tells her about a movie he saw over the weekend.
- Pretty soon, Francis puts his foot in his mouth yet again—this time by implying, out of nowhere, that he wants Mae to feel sexually subordinated to him.
- Once again, Mae chooses to let Francis' unwelcome comment slide.
- Mae changes the subject and gets Francis talking about ChildTrack, the child safety project he's working on.
- As Francis explains, the plan is to develop permanent tracking devices that can be implanted directly into children's bones. Once they're there, no child will ever go missing again.
- Mae gets back to work after her oh-so-short lunch with Francis. When she takes a bathroom break three hours later, she meets a mysterious man loitering around the hallway, looking lost.
- When Mae asks the man if he's lost, he tells her that he isn't. He also tells her that his name is Kalden, which he says is Tibetan for "golden something" (1.12.17).
- When Mae tells Kalden that she needs to get back to work, he asks if he can follow along to see what she does.
- Mae agrees with hesitation, and they head back to her desk. There, Kalden hovers over her shoulder and watches her work for a while.
- Kalden eventually wanders off again, and, pretty soon, someone else appears—a woman named Gina, who's come to make sure that Mae is connected to all of the social networks at the company.
- When she arrives, Gina adds yet another computer monitor to the growing cluster that sits on Mae's desk. In addition to having a monitor that projects her interactions with customers and another that projects her interactions with her supervisors at the Circle, Mae now has a third that projects her "InnerCircle" and "OuterCircle" social feeds.
- Mae feels gratified by the growing amount of electronics on her desk, and she tells herself that "[o]nly at the Circle" would someone so "low on the ladder" be lavished with such a set-up (1.12.59).
- As Gina walks Mae through a few of the Circle's social apps, it becomes clear that anyone at the Circle can monitor any other employee's location throughout the day, and can even see when people arrive on campus for the day and leave at night.
- When Gina hooks Mae up to the InnerCircle social feed, Mae realizes that she has more than 8,000 missed messages to catch up on.
- As Gina tells her, Mae can probably tackle them all that night.
- That night, Mae gets to work trying to catch up on the thousands of InnerCircle messages she missed from the week before.
- After that, Mae tries to catch up on her OuterCircle feed, too—the social feed where she can connect to the friends and contacts she had before joining the Circle.
- Hours later, Mae has to call it quits before she's anywhere near done.
- Back at work on Tuesday morning, Mae finds that having to keep an eye on the social feeds flowing across her third monitor really cuts into the spare time that she used to get at her workstation.
- Now, there's a constant deluge of social messages that Mae has to deal with on top of her correspondence with customers and her supervisors at the Circle.
- At first, Mae finds it difficult to deal with the added input, but she soon finds it "exhilarating" (1.14.2).
- In the late morning, Mae receives a message from her supervisor, Dan, who calls her into his office to chat.
- When Mae gets there, Dan is waiting with a man Mae doesn't recognize.
- Dan introduces the man as Alistair.
- Although neither Alistair nor Dan tell Mae what's going on, Mae quickly gets the impression that she's done something to offend Alistair, and that Dan has called her in to deal with the conflict.
- Eventually, Mae realizes that Alistair had invited her to a Portugal-themed brunch the week before, and that she—not having access to the company's social feed—had failed to respond to his invitations and had missed the party.
- Rather than explaining that she didn't have access to the InnerCircle feed when Alistair sent his invitations, Mae apologies and does her best to smooth things over.
- Eventually, Dan feels satisfied that the problem has been resolved, and he sends Mae back to work.
- Once Mae returns to her desk, Dan sends her a copy of the report that he plans to forward to human resources. Mae signs her name on the dotted line (electronically, of course) and sends it back.
- At lunchtime later that day, Mae meets up with Annie.
- Annie tells Mae that she listened in on the meeting between Mae, Dan, and Alistair, and she reassures Mae that these little conflicts happen all the time.
- In an effort to cheer Mae up, Annie brings her to "the free sample room"—a big room filled with products that various companies have donated to the Circle for free distribution.
- As Mae and Annie walk around the room, Mae asks for more reassurance about the meeting with Dan and Alistair. Annie tells her not to worry and remarks that Alistair is just a "needy nut" (1.15.61).
- Soon, Annie takes off, leaving Mae alone to finish taking her pick of the free goods.
- Twenty minutes later, Mae returns to her desk and discovers a string of increasingly panicky messages from Annie.
- As she reads them, it becomes clear that Annie is terrified that Mae has tattled to Dan and repeated the not-so-nice things that Annie said about Alistair's neediness.
- Mae calls Annie and reassures her that she hasn't said anything to Dan.
- Concerned about her friend's uncharacteristic paranoia, Mae tries to convince Annie to come out for drinks after work.
- Annie refuses, telling Mae that she's way too busy to take time off.
- Since Annie won't go out with her, Mae calls Francis Garaventa and asks if he'll come out with her when the workday is done. He says yes.
- Later that afternoon, Mae and Francis drive to San Francisco and find a restaurant where they can eat and drink on the cheap.
- Afterward, Mae kisses Francis on the street, and the two of them wander around the city, kissing and having fun.
- Over the course of the next few days, Mae and Francis continue to spend as much of their free time together as they can.
- When Friday rolls around, Mae and Francis go to the Great Hall together to watch the week's Dream Friday presentation.
- This Friday, the speaker delivering the presentation is Gus Khazeni, a Circler who's developed a new dating app called LuvLuv. As Gus tells the room, the app is going to take all of the stress and worry out of planning the perfect first date.
- To Mae's horror, when Gus asks for a volunteer from the audience to come up and run through the app, Francis raises his hand.
- Pretty soon, Francis is up on stage with Gus, and the two of them are using LuvLuv to dig up tons of personal information about Mae.
- Mae is furious and embarrassed. She holds out as long as she can, but she eventually gets up and leaves the auditorium before she gets called up onto the stage herself.
- Back at her desk in the Customer Experience office, Mae refuses to listen to Francis' apologies. In fact, she never wants to speak to him again.
- Francis eventually leaves Mae alone to get back to work, but he continues to send her apologetic messages throughout the day.
- For her part, Mae isn't entirely sure why she felt so humiliated during the presentation. None of the information that Gus and Francis pulled up was private—all of it was stuff that she had made public herself by posting it on her own social media over the years.
- Although she gets congratulatory messages from other Circlers throughout the day, Mae ignores them and focuses on her work.
- Finally, at the end of the day, Mae sees that she's missed a number of messages from her mother—all of them telling her to come home.
- As Mae drives back to Longfield, she calls her mother and learns that her father has had a seizure and is in the hospital.
- But, by the time Mae gets into town, her parents are already back at home, and so Mae meets them there instead.
- When she pulls into her parents' driveway, Mae is annoyed to find that her ex-boyfriend Mercer Medeiros is there.
- Mae rushes inside to see what's up, but her parents are taking things easy. They sing Mercer's praises as they explain that he helped them to get her father to the hospital without having to call an ambulance, and Mae's frustration grows as she's forced to hear all about Mercer's goodness.
- When Mae's mother asks her if she wants to share some of the chicken that Mercer brought for supper, Mae heads upstairs to wash up and let off some steam.
- Later that evening, Mae and Mercer sit out in the backyard together and chat about work.
- It doesn't take long for Mae to step on Mercer's toes by mentioning that she's seen people complaining online about his artisanal chandelier business.
- As Mae steamrolls through their conversation, Mercer stops her and tells her that he wants to change how the two of them interact.
- Mercer makes it clear that he disapproves of the amount of stock that Mae puts in social media, and he shares his thoughts about the damages that their social media-saturated culture is inflicting.
- Mae hears him out, but everything that Mercer says just confirms her impression that he's a ridiculous dud.
- Mae decides to spend the whole weekend with her parents in Longfield.
- Saturday passes uneventfully, but something embarrassing happens on Sunday.
- After they watch some TV together, Mae's father asks her to help him get up off the couch. When Mae tries to pull him up, he soils himself.
- At first, Mae doesn't realize what's happened. When her father asks her to go and get her mother, she insists that she can help with whatever he needs.
- When Mae eventually clues in to her father's predicament, she goes to find her mother. When she does, her mother tells her that she should head back to the city.
- As her mother puts it, Mae's father wouldn't want her helping him through something like this, and Mae has to "grant him some dignity" (1.20.17).