Years ago I left a job the way you are supposed to: a handover document nobody read, a last round of coffees, the badge on the desk. The place that moved a lot of money very fast, the same floor from a few weeks back.
Three years later they had me in for something small, and on the way to the meeting room I passed the big screen on the wall. There it was. The status board I built. Squares made of smaller squares, the whole floor's health in one glance, so the team would see trouble coming instead of meeting it. Forty-one squares. All green. I actually stopped walking, the way you do when an old song comes on in the supermarket.
Nobody had touched it in three years. That was the design. Three years of mornings it told people what was coming, and I was not in the building for one of them.
I stood there a bit longer than the meeting justified. Proud, obviously. Full peacock. And under the pride something I have fewer flattering names for. The board didn't know me. It's the one thing I have ever fully let run without me, and the way I managed that was to hand in a badge and leave.
Been thinking about that board all week, because of the machine, the AI I set up this summer for the work I keep not doing. The machine lives on a computer that isn't mine. I told myself that was for uptime. It wasn't for uptime.
Rule two did its work on Monday, by the way: the machine sent the payment reminder, politely, to the man who owes me. No answer yet. The machine is not troubled by waiting. I checked.
Tuesday again, and Wednesday more often than I'd admit to a doctor. Each time an itch between the shoulders, then the same nothing…
Anyway. The kitchen radio: youth unemployment up again, a man calling it structural, the way you'd say it about rain. Nothing I can do about that tonight.
The Mrs. caught me smiling at the sink. She dried a glass, looked at me a second longer than the glass needed, and let it go. She has seen that smile before. It usually costs us a weekend.
The show must go on.
— Queen