The Secular Rosary

Pressing the ‘Tab’ key over and over again has become a form of secular rosary for me. My left pinky is actually twitching from the repetitive motion of navigating fields that shouldn’t exist in a system that was supposed to ‘simplify’ my workflow. I am sitting in Conference Room 107, staring at a projector screen that is slightly out of focus, while a consultant named Bryce explains why the ‘Status’ column in ProjectFlow 360 is conceptually different from the ‘State’ column in the software we deleted 17 days ago. The air conditioning is humming a flat B-flat, and the fluorescent lights are flickering at a frequency that suggests they are trying to communicate a warning in Morse code. We are four hours into a seven-hour training session for a tool that looks, smells, and fails exactly like the one it replaced. This is the ritual of the modern workplace: the infinite loop of onboarding, a collective hallucination where we believe that changing the interface will somehow fix the underlying rot in the process.

The Terms and the Typo

I just finished reading every single word of the 47-page Terms and Conditions for this new platform. Nobody does that. I did it because I wanted to see if there was a clause that admitted this was all a performance. There wasn’t, obviously. Instead, there was just a lot of legalese about data sovereignty and liability limitations. It reminded me of my friend Max D.-S., a refugee resettlement advisor who once spent 27 months trying to integrate a case management system for families coming from 17 different conflict zones. Max is the kind of guy who carries a physical notebook because he’s seen too many ‘revolutionary’ databases vanish into the ether during a server migration. He told me once that the hardest part of his job wasn’t the bureaucracy or the trauma; it was the fact that every time the government changed a vendor, he had to spend 157 hours re-entering the names of children who had already been processed three times. He once made a specific mistake-a typo in a field that didn’t allow for accents-and it took 77 emails to correct it. The software didn’t care about the family; it cared about the field.

The Mask of Innovation

We buy these tools because we are terrified of the silence that comes with admitting we don’t know how to work together. If the project is failing, it’s not because the goals are vague or the leadership is absent; it’s because we haven’t found the right ‘agile’ dashboard yet. So we spend $17,007 on a subscription, another $7,007 on ‘implementation specialists,’ and we force 47 adults to sit in a room and learn how to use a ‘chat-based collaborative ecosystem’ that is functionally identical to the email threads we are already drowning in. It is a signaling mechanism. By purchasing the new software, the organization signals to its stakeholders that it is ‘innovating.’ It is a mask for a lack of direction. We aren’t solving problems; we are just re-labeling them with a more modern font. I’ve noticed that the more dysfunctional a company is, the more frequently it changes its project management software. It’s a form of corporate bulimia-purging the old data and the old failures to make room for the new ‘clean’ slate that will be messy again in 7 months.

[The dashboard is a graveyard of good intentions.]

– Observation

Friction by Design

Max D.-S. once described the feeling of a new software rollout as ‘technological displacement.’ You lose your landmarks. The button that used to be on the top right is now a hidden gesture on the bottom left. The logic of your daily movements is discarded by someone in an office 1007 miles away who has never had to actually resettle a human being. The irony is that the more we ‘streamline,’ the more friction we create. We are obsessed with solutionism-the belief that every human problem has a digital answer. But some problems are just messy. Some problems require sitting in a room and arguing until someone cries or someone relents. You can’t automate the emotional labor of consensus. Yet, we keep trying. We try to turn every interaction into a ticket, every conversation into a thread, and every person into a ‘user.’

AI and the Refugee Paradox

There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from realizing you have lived through this exact moment 7 times before. I remember the excitement of the first ‘Cloud’ migration. We felt like we were leaving the gravity of the Earth behind. Now, the Cloud is just another place where my files go to die. Max D.-S. called me last week and mentioned he’s being forced onto a new platform again. This one uses AI to ‘predict’ the needs of refugees. He sounded older. He told me that the AI kept flagging 17-year-old boys as ‘high-risk’ because they didn’t have a stable address history-forgetting that the very definition of a refugee is someone without a stable address history. The tool was working perfectly according to its code, and perfectly failing according to its purpose. But the department head got a promotion for ‘implementing an AI-driven resettlement framework.’ The success was the implementation, not the outcome.

The Luxury of Legacy

I often wonder what would happen if we just stopped. If we refused the next update. If we told the C-suite that we are going to keep using the ‘clunky’ old system because we finally understand its quirks. There is a beauty in a tool that has been worn down by use, like a wooden handle on a hammer that has molded itself to the palm of the carpenter. But software doesn’t age; it just becomes ‘legacy.’ And in our culture, ‘legacy’ is a slur. We are addicted to the ‘new’ because it allows us to avoid the ‘now.’ If we are busy onboarding, we don’t have to face the fact that our revenue is stagnant or our turnover is 37 percent. We are in a state of perpetual preparation. We are always getting ready to work, but we are rarely actually working. I’ve spent 47 percent of my career learning how to use tools I no longer have access to. That is a staggering loss of human capital. It’s a library of Alexandria burning every time a SaaS company goes bust or gets acquired.

The Most Honest Sentence

I think back to those Terms and Conditions. Section 17.4: ‘The company does not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted or error-free.’ That’s the most honest sentence in the whole 47 pages. It’s a confession. They know it’s going to break. They know we’re going to hate it. But the contract is signed, the $177,000 licensing fee is paid, and Bryce has three more hours of slides. I look around the room. Most of my colleagues have checked out. Sarah is looking at shoes. Tom is staring at a blank wall. We are all physically here, but our souls have migrated to a different server. We are waiting for the bell to ring, for the ‘completion certificate’ to be emailed to us so we can go back to our desks and try to figure out how to do our actual work despite the new system, rather than because of it.

The Perpetual Loop

I give it 17 months before the next Bryce walks through that door with a new set of slides and a new ‘revolutionary’ way to make us all feel a little bit more like machines.