The left Shift key is gone. Not sticky, not intermittent. It’s a dead plastic square, a tombstone on the second row of Anya’s keyboard. For a software engineer whose entire world is mediated through text, this is like a carpenter having a hammer with a cracked handle. It works, sort of, if you’re willing to get blisters. Anya has been typing everything that requires capitalization by mashing the right Shift key with her pinky finger, a painful contortion that slows her down by, she estimates, at least 7 percent.
She submitted the request three weeks ago. The keyboard costs $47. Her time is billed to the client at $247 an hour. So far, she has spent 3.7 hours navigating the procurement portal, emailing her manager, her manager’s manager, and a person in IT named Dave who only communicates through ticket updates that say “Pending Approval.” The company has, in effect, spent $917 of its client’s money to avoid spending $47 of its own.
This isn’t a story about bad math. To focus on the financial absurdity is to miss the point entirely. I used to make that mistake. I’d sit in meetings, listening to justifications for seven-layer approval processes for trivial expenses, and I’d think, “These people are simply incompetent.” I was wrong. The process isn’t a bug; it’s the entire feature. Its purpose is not to save the company $47. Its purpose is to demonstrate that the people who command the process are powerful, necessary, and in control. The friction is the message.
This is a form of institutional theater. The elaborate, time-consuming ritual reinforces the hierarchy. Each signature, each digital ticket kicked up the chain, is a small act of fealty, a confirmation that someone else’s authority supersedes a productive employee’s basic need. The process isn’t broken. It’s working perfectly, just not for the purpose you think.
I fell down a research rabbit hole the other night, reading about the Byzantine Empire’s administrative state. They had officials called *Logothetes* who managed everything from the postal service to the army’s payroll. Over centuries, their systems became so complex, so layered with checks and balances and official stamps, that they stifled the very empire they were meant to serve. The goal shifted from enabling the army to fight to perfecting the process of supplying the army. The paperwork became more important than the war. We just traded parchment and wax seals for ServiceNow and Oracle. The impulse is identical.
Consider my friend, Charlie T.-M. He’s a formulator for a boutique skincare company. He creates sunscreens. It’s a ridiculously precise job, a kind of kitchen chemistry that involves balancing UV filters, stabilizing emulsions, and ensuring the final product feels silky instead of greasy. His primary tool, aside from a homogenizer that sounds like a jet engine, is a high-resolution monitor. He needs to see, with perfect accuracy, the subtle color shifts and textural variations in a mixture. A slight sheen or a barely perceptible mottling can tell him if a batch is going to separate in three months.
Charlie’s Monitor vs. Batch Risk
His monitor started flickering two months ago. A vertical green line now lives permanently on the right side of the screen. He submitted a request for a new one, a standard model that costs $237. The immediate response was a form with 27 fields, including a request to justify the “business-critical need” for color accuracy. He’s formulating a batch of sunscreen worth, on the low end, around $7,777. The risk of losing that batch because he can’t see what he’s doing is astronomically higher than the cost of the equipment.
But the system isn’t designed to evaluate that risk. It is designed to follow its own internal logic. His request sits in a queue. He has been told the average fulfillment time is 47 days. So Charlie squints, tilts his head, and hopes for the best, a tiny gamble with thousands of dollars of product every single day.
It’s maddening to watch this unfold while living in a world where other systems have been optimized to the point of invisibility. We have built global, instantaneous digital economies where friction is the ultimate enemy. Entire industries exist to shave milliseconds off transaction times. In many parts of the world, complex transfers and acquisitions are seamless; getting access to digital currency for a platform, like with a متجر شحن جاكو, happens in the time it takes for a page to load. Yet the physical world, especially the corporate one, remains stubbornly, intentionally, medieval. This juxtaposition is the insult. It shows that the problem isn’t a lack of technical solutions. The problem is a lack of will, because someone benefits from the delay.
TAXED
On Productivity & Morale
It’s the constant, grinding message from the organization to its most valuable people that their needs are trivial, their judgment is untrustworthy, and their time is worthless.
So you stop asking. You learn to work around the broken tool. You develop the awkward muscle memory to hit the right Shift key instead of the left. You squint at the flickering monitor. You don’t mention the faulty pH meter because you know it will trigger a seven-week calibration protocol. This slow, quiet surrender isn’t laziness. It’s a rational response to a dysfunctional environment. It is the beginning of disengagement.
Here’s my confession, the part that makes me feel like a hypocrite. About a decade ago, I was a junior manager, and I once denied an employee’s request for a new ergonomic mouse. Why? Because it was a non-standard model and my director had issued a memo about sticking to the approved equipment list to simplify IT support. I knew the employee had wrist pain. I knew the mouse cost about $77. I also knew that if I approved it, I’d have to fill out a justification form and attach a screenshot of the director’s approval, which I’d have to get first. I took the path of least resistance. I became a tiny, insignificant agent of the very bureaucracy I hated. I enforced the process because it was easier than fighting it. I still think about that.
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That’s the insidious genius of these systems. They don’t require villains, just a critical mass of people who are too tired, too busy, or too timid to challenge the script. Each person just follows the rule in front of them, and the sum of all that reasonable, individual compliance is a deeply unreasonable and soul-crushing machine.