This Is How to Deal With San Francisco Tech Trash
One evening I met with an acquaintance who like me, is a born and raised San Franciscan. Any time I hang out with another member of our rare species, almost immediately the question, What on earth is going on in the City? gets asked.
Tonight was no different. My friend described a recent visit to a coffee shop in Noe Valley where he lived. A few minutes after sitting down to enjoy his latte and pastry, a tech guy approached him and asked when he would be finished occupying the table. My friend let the tech person know that he just sat down and didn’t plan to move anytime soon, but of course the tech dude couldn’t just drop it and find a different spot. To my friend’s annoyance, the tech person began to throw a tantrum. “I’ll be honest Eric,” my friend said. “This ruined my entire day!”
I chuckled and said, “See that was your first mistake. You can’t let the tech trash get to you!”
Before I continue, I want to make it very, very clear what I mean when I say tech trash. You may be familiar with the terms techie or tech bro- these are both exclusionary. Not all tech workers are men, many of them are quite scrawny, and believe it or not, some tech workers possess manners!
Tech trash are individuals (usually millennials) who moved to San Francisco after 2010 and believe themselves to be superior because they work in tech. These are the folks who are notorious for occupying the table at the restaurant for three hours, and never tip their servers. They’re culture-less scum who moved to San Francisco to find culture, and whose very existence defies culture.
The first question they will normally ask you is Where do you work?, shortly followed by, So what’s your salary? immediately followed by, And how many options were you offered?
Tech trash and their adamant refusal to carry themselves with any decency can at times make it less than desirable to live in San Francisco.
Anyway, back to my friend’s story. All of a sudden, another techie crosses the street with his kid in a stroller purely to support the first guy! Oh god they’re reproducing, I thought as I visualized the guy pushing his kid down 24th Street. By this point, my friend is livid. I raised my hand to cover my mouth so that I didn’t burst out laughing.
Incredulous, my friend demands to know what is so funny. “I mean how do you do it, Eric?” he asked. “I know they piss you off too!”
I smiled, lifted my eyebrows and said, Well! I thought you’d never ask:
You’ve gotta have a sense of humor. When I first moved back to San Francisco, it would piss me off to no end watching all the tech trash running around my hometown, calling it their personal playground. I would go from being incredibly depressed to incredibly enraged until one day I got fed up with the roller coaster and had a heart to heart with myself. This was the conclusion I came to: while I can’t bring back the old San Francisco, what I can do is tell people about it, and every day exemplify the values that made this City the birthplace of movements that have spread across the entire country and changed history. So I always remember to keep a sense of humor. At the end of the day, if you allow some tech trash to raise your blood pressure a single digit, then they won.
The No-But. I’m curious if this is something you find in other major cities, but here in San Francisco when you ask someone if they’re from here, one of two things usually happens. Sometimes people will outright lie; usually you can cut to the chase pretty quickly by asking them what high school they attended, although sometimes people become offended when you remind them that Daly City, Walnut Creek, San Mateo or San Jose are not San Francisco. Oftentimes people will feel the need to tell you how long they’ve lived in the City, even if you didn’t ask. I call this “The No-But.” Are you from San Francisco? No, but I’ve been here ten years. No, but I’ve been here three months. Five days. You get the point. Next time some tech trash hits you with the No-But, quickly elevate your voice right when they get to “But”, and say “Oh, thanks! That’s all I wanted to know.” And then quickly change the topic of the conversation.
This too shall pass. Cities change; it’s the one thing that is constant. Just like San Francisco is no longer home to the Barbary Coast, the Beatniks or the hippies, I believe the tech trash and their bullshit sense of entitlement will also one day leave San Francisco. Many of them left during the pandemic, and just like my dad says, they usually scurry away once they do a little bit of math and realize how property taxes work.
Will San Francisco ever again be home to artists and musicians, writers and community activists? Your guess is as good as mine, but of course there will always be tech workers. And I don’t have a problem with that. Just don’t be tech trash.
Eric Curry is a sixth generation San Franciscan. He gives walking tours all over the City, including a very popular Mission Food and Culture Tour and a Historic Haunted Pub Crawl. You can find out more information here.