Cupcakes and Cargo Cults: The Million-Dollar Click
The frosting is too thick, a synthetic neon pink that leaves a waxy residue on the roof of my mouth, and I am currently staring at a screen that has been ‘loading’ for exactly 31 minutes. It is Go-Live day for Project Phoenix. On the 41 monitors surrounding me in this cramped, windowless conference room, the same flickering blue bird logo mocks our collective patience. We were told this $1,000,001 investment would streamline our legacy ‘friction.’ Instead, I feel the physical sensation of my blood pressure rising in direct proportion to the spinning wheel of death on the overhead projector. My hand reaches for another cupcake. It is a nervous reflex, a sugary sedative for the realization that we have just spent a year building a digital monument to our own dysfunction.
Brenda’s dot-matrix printer:
Rhythmic *thwack-zip*.
VS
The ‘modern’ cloud interface:
A simple weighted average fails.
Brenda, who has been with the department for 21 years and possesses a memory like a steel trap for every bureaucratic loophole ever conceived, is already sighing. It is a specific kind of sigh-the sound of an expert watching an amateur try to fix a watch with a sledgehammer. She has already retreated to her desk, where she’s printing out the ‘Advanced Analytics’ report so she can manually highlight the errors and type them into her 11-year-old
