The screen glowed a sickly blue, casting long, digital shadows across Harper J.-M.’s face. Another click, another folder, a decade of digital debris accumulated like sediment. Harper, a queue management specialist of seventeen years and one month, found herself sifting through an email thread from January two thousand twenty-one. A goal: ‘Optimize inter-departmental ticket resolution by 11% using the new CRM module.’ The CRM module, a monument to corporate optimism, had been decommissioned by March, swallowed by budget cuts and a spectacularly bad user interface. Yet, here she was, in December two thousand twenty-one, tasked with providing ‘evidence of achievement’ for a ghost project. Her boss, a harried man named Martin, was likely doing the exact same thing, just three cubicles over, probably searching for his own phantom accomplishments.
This wasn’t development. This wasn’t growth. This wasn’t even about performance, not in any real, tangible sense. This was archaeology. A desperate dig for artifacts that might, just might, justify a bonus that amounted to 31 dollars after taxes, or prevent a ‘needs improvement’ rating that could haunt one’s internal HR file for a thousand and one days. It felt like a deliberate act of dehumanization, reducing an entire year of complex, adaptive, often frantic work into a series of poorly defined boxes and arbitrary metrics. And it was all based on goals set when the world was
