The Pain of Mandatory Worship

The blue light from the monitor is currently drilling a hole through my forehead, and I can feel that familiar, rhythmic twitch in my diaphragm that reminds me of the 13 minutes I spent hiccuping during last week’s quarterly board presentation. It was a social death, a rhythmic betrayal of my own body, much like the software we are currently being forced to worship. We are 3 hours into the mandatory training for ‘Project Phoenix,’ a name that was supposed to imply a rebirth but currently feels more like a slow cremation of our collective productivity.

The trainer, a man whose enthusiasm feels like it was manufactured in a factory with low safety standards, is clicking through a submenu that requires 13 separate inputs just to generate a basic report. In the corner of my screen, a private chat bubble from Aisha A.J. pops up. Aisha is our lead difficulty balancer for the RPG division-someone whose entire career is dedicated to the delicate science of making obstacles feel rewarding rather than punishing. She writes: ‘This UI has a higher encounter rate than a swamp level with no repellent.’

I look at the participant count: 153 people are currently watching a man explain how to use a $2,000,003 platform that nobody asked for and nobody knows how to navigate. The irony is thick enough to choke on. We bought this system because the leadership team believed that our internal communication was fractured, that our data was ‘leaking’ through the cracks of outdated systems, and that we needed a single source of truth.

The Law of Human Nature vs. Corporate Friction

Aisha A.J. knows more about systems than anyone I’ve ever met. In her world, if a player stops using a mechanic, it’s not because the player is lazy; it’s because the mechanic is broken. It’s because the friction of the task outweighs the dopamine of the reward. In the corporate world, we ignore this basic law of human nature. We assume that if we spend enough money on a license, the employees will eventually bend their will to the software’s idiosyncratic demands. We treat software like a magic wand that can be waved over a dysfunctional culture to make it sparkle. But software is just a mirror. If your processes are a tangled knot of ego and redundancy, the software will simply give you a high-definition, 4K rendering of that knot.

I remember 3 years ago when we were still using a series of 13 interconnected spreadsheets. They were ugly. They were prone to human error. But they were also profoundly human. They were built by the people who actually used them. If a column didn’t work, someone stayed late to fix the formula. There was an ownership there that ‘Project Phoenix’ can never replicate because it was forced upon us from the top down. We have traded agency for automation, and the result is a workforce that is now spending 43 percent of its day trying to figure out why the automated notifications aren’t firing.

It is a transfer of wealth from the producers to the vendors, justified by the hope that technology will absolve us from the hard work of managing one another. We want the software to be the ‘bad guy’ who enforces the rules so we don’t have to have uncomfortable conversations about why the reports are late in the first place.

The Zoo Without Animals

This reminds me of a conversation I had with a consultant who specialized in tourist experiences. He told me that people often think a visitor’s frustration is caused by a lack of information, so they flood the space with maps and signs. But if the physical layout of the park is nonsensical, no amount of signage will help. It’s like handing a visitor a Zoo Guide when the enclosures are empty and the paths lead to dead ends; the guide can be a masterpiece of design, but it cannot conjure animals out of thin air or make a labyrinth feel like a sanctuary.

Our software is supposed to be our guide, but we are wandering through a zoo where the lions have been replaced by empty boxes and the gift shop is the only thing that actually works.

The Illusion of Control

I look back at the Zoom window. The trainer is now showing us how to ‘customize our dashboards.’ This is the ultimate corporate distraction. It gives us the illusion of control while the fundamental architecture of our work remains shattered. You can change the color of the buttons from ‘Corporate Blue’ to ‘Aggressive Magenta,’ but you still have to click them 13 times to get a single piece of actionable data.

I want to laugh, but the phantom hiccup in my chest is becoming a real one. We are witnessing a silent revolution, a grassroots movement of employees who are choosing the ‘primitive’ tools they understand over the ‘advanced’ tools that treat them like idiots. When Aisha balances a game, she looks for ‘dead ends’-parts of the map where players get stuck and give up. Our entire company is currently stuck in a digital dead end.

Culture as Hardware

We often talk about ‘digital transformation’ as if it’s a religious experience, a baptism in code that will wash away our sins of inefficiency. But we forget that the water has to be clean. Instead, we chose the path of maximum resistance. We chose the vendor with the best PowerPoint presentation and the most impressive list of buzzwords. We chose the ‘Project Phoenix’ because it sounded heroic, and we are a culture that values the hero’s journey even if the hero is just a piece of buggy code that crashes every time you try to export a PDF.

Aisha A.J. is right: the encounter rate for frustration is too high. We are grinding for experience points in a game that has no endgame.

The Conclusion: The Glitch as Survival

I find myself wondering what would happen if we just stopped. What if we admitted that the $2,000,003 was a sunk cost? The fear, of course, is that we would look like failures. We would have to admit to the board-the same board I hiccuped at for 13 minutes-that we were wrong. And in the modern corporate landscape, being wrong is seen as a greater sin than being expensively, catastrophically inefficient. We would rather bleed out slowly through a thousand 3-hour Zoom calls than admit that we bought a map to a place that doesn’t exist.

The trainer is wrapping up now. He asks if there are any questions. The silence is deafening. 153 people are staring at their screens, their faces illuminated by the blue light of a failed promise. I know she’s already back in her game engine, tweaking the hitboxes of a dragon to make sure the players feel powerful. She understands what our leadership doesn’t: that the goal of any system should be to disappear. A good tool doesn’t demand your attention; it facilitates your intention.

As I close the Zoom window and open my secret, ‘unauthorized’ Excel file, I feel a strange sense of relief. The $2,000,003 ghost is still there, haunting our servers, but down here on the ground, we’re still finding ways to survive the machinery.

I take a deep breath, hold it for 13 seconds, and wait for the hiccups to finally stop. They don’t. Some things, it seems, can’t be fixed with a restart. You just have to wait for the spasm to pass and hope that next time, you don’t spend $2,000,003 just to find out you were already holding the answer in your hands.