The mouse click echoed in the silence of the 17th floor, a sharp, plastic snap that felt far too violent for the task at hand. Sarah held her breath. On the screen, the ‘Next-Gen Enterprise Resource Synchronizer’-a platform the company had just spent $2,000,007 to implement-pulsed with a soft, mocking blue light. The ‘Submit’ button remained a stubborn, translucent grey. Hovering her cursor over the ghosted icon, a tiny tooltip appeared: ‘Error 77: Mandatory field 37b-7 (Asset Depreciation Category) requires a 17-digit alphanumeric string.’
Sarah’s coffee was cold. She had started a diet at 4pm today, and the lack of a late-afternoon bagel was making the blue light of the monitor feel like a physical weight against her eyes. She had been at this for 47 minutes. In the old system-a clunky, DOS-looking thing from 1987-this invoice approval took exactly two steps. Now, it was a 17-click odyssey through nested menus, modal windows, and ‘streamlined’ workflows that felt about as aerodynamic as a brick wall. It was a digital maze designed by people who clearly had never had to justify a $77 expense to a suspicious auditor.
This is the great lie of the modern corporate landscape: the belief that complexity is a synonym for progress. We buy the box, we buy the license, and we buy the 77-page implementation guide, all to avoid the agonizing, messy work of talking to each other and fixing the underlying rot.
The Placebo of Agency
Greta T.J. knows all about masks. As an elevator inspector with 37 years in the field, she spends her days looking at the things people are meant to ignore. She showed me the ‘Close Door’ button, which wasn’t even wired to the control board. It was a placebo, a bit of psychological theatre designed to give the passengers a sense of agency while they waited for the machine to do what it was always going to do.
Modern enterprise software is increasingly composed of these ‘Close Door’ buttons. We are given dashboards that visualize data we can’t change and ‘collaboration hubs’ that just add 17 more notifications to a day already drowning in them. The software isn’t there to make Sarah’s job faster; it’s there so a Vice President can point to a 77-slide deck and say they have ‘digitized the procurement vertical.’
The Substitute for Conversation
We are so quick to throw $7,777 at a digital tool because it feels like ‘doing something.’ In the corporate world, the tool is a substitute for the hard conversation. It’s easier to buy a $2,000,007 system than it is to admit that the way we handle invoices has been broken since the Bush administration.
The Dignity of the Tangible
When dealing with the literal ground beneath your feet, like at Hardwood Refinishing, you can’t ‘UI’ your way out of a bad installation. You cannot download a new floor. It requires precision that a dropdown menu could never capture.
The Digital Rock Pile
Sarah finally found the ‘Asset Depreciation Category’ dropdown. It contained 107 options, none of which were ‘Miscellaneous Office Supplies.’ She picked the one that sounded the least likely to trigger a federal investigation and clicked ‘Submit.’ The screen whirred. A loading bar appeared, crawling across the screen with the agonizing slowness of a tectonic plate.
Loading 17 Stages of Approval…
3% Complete
Why do we tolerate this? Because we have been convinced that ‘manual’ is a dirty word. But Sarah’s 17 clicks are not automated. They are manual labor dressed up in pixels. She is doing the digital equivalent of moving a pile of rocks from one side of a yard to the other, one rock at a time, using a pair of very expensive, very shiny tweezers.
Shiny Software
Lives in the Cloud
Actual Reality
Keeps the Company Running
[We are becoming the API for our own tools.]
A software salesperson thought a ‘tag’ solved human problems. But a tag isn’t a conversation. The distance between the shiny software and the actual work-that’s where the $2,000,007 went. It went into the frustration.
Clarity Through Deprivation
“We don’t need more tools. We need better eyes. We need to look past the polished brass buttons to the cables and the grease.”
The Final Loop
If Sarah had the power, she would spend that money on three more accountants and a system that stayed out of her way. But instead, she is stuck in the loop, waiting for a ‘Submit’ button to turn blue, serving a machine that was supposed to serve her. We are building digital cathedrals to house our organizational sins.
“Success! Your request has been queued for 17-stage approval.”
Sarah closed her eyes. She didn’t feel successful. She felt like she had just won a fight with a ghost, and the ghost was already planning its revenge for 08:07 tomorrow morning. She reached into her drawer, found a single, forgotten peppermint, and broke her diet. It was the only real thing that had happened all afternoon.