Workplace BS
The meeting that was an email, and the three that were the same email
Meetings expand because calling one is free for the organiser and expensive for everyone else. That asymmetry explains almost all…
Jhilik Mahapatra
Contributing writer, SuckButt
Jhilik writes about everyday irritations and believes packaging is a conspiracy.
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11 articles
Workplace BS
Corporate language exists to make a decision sound like weather
Nobody restructures. Restructuring happens. The grammar of workplace announcements is doing a specific and deliberate job.
The Internet Sucks
The first four results are advertisements and the label is grey on grey
Search advertising has to be identified as advertising. Nothing says the identification has to be easy to see.
Workplace BS
Mandatory training: forty minutes of clicking next to prove you were there
Compliance modules exist to create a record. Whether anybody learned anything is a separate question that nobody is measuring.
The Internet Sucks
Select every square containing a traffic light, including the pole
The puzzle is not testing whether you are human. It is a risk score, and the pictures appear when the score is ambiguous.
The Internet Sucks
A thousand words of nothing, written to match a search you made
Pages generated to occupy a search result have a recognisable shape, and learning it saves a great deal of reading.
Workplace BS
The job advert with a salary range wide enough to park a bus in
Every ambiguity in a job posting is doing work for somebody, and it is rarely the person reading it.
Workplace BS
Expenses: prove you bought a sandwich, in triplicate, within thirty days
The process is built to survive an audit, not to reimburse a person. Everything irritating about it follows from that one fact.
The Internet Sucks
This site is better in the app, insists the site, blocking the site
App install interstitials interrupt a working web page to promote a slower way of reaching the same content.
Workplace BS
Team building: a day out with people you would rather email
Enforced socialising is assigned to solve problems that have structural causes, which is why it so reliably fails to solve them.
Workplace BS
Week three, still no laptop, ticket escalated to the queue it came from
Onboarding fails at the joins between departments, and nobody owns a join. That is the whole diagnosis.