Click. The button glows a faint, mocking blue for a moment before turning grey. The loading icon, a pixelated sand-timer straight from 1997, begins its lazy rotation. You’ve been at this for 17 minutes. All you want is a round-trip flight to Denver for the quarterly sales meeting. A task that, on any consumer website, would take maybe 47 seconds.
But this isn’t a consumer website. This is the company’s mandatory travel portal, “SynergyBook Pro.” It has the aesthetic of a tax form and the user experience of a low-grade migraine. You try to filter by airline, and the entire page reloads, clearing your dates. You select a flight, and it informs you your choice is “out of compliance” with a policy nobody can find, citing subsection C-17. You lean back, the warmth from the laptop pressing into your legs, and feel that specific, modern exhaustion. The exhaustion of fighting a machine that isn’t broken, but is ruthlessly executing a program of bureaucratic self-preservation. You know how this ends. You’ll give up, book the flight on Kayak in under a minute, and then spend twice as long fabricating an expense report that fits the SynergyBook narrative.