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, and there it was. The status board I built. Squares made of smaller squares, the whole floor's health in one glance, made so the team would see trouble coming instead of meeting it. Forty-one squares. All green.
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. 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 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.
The kitchen radio, meanwhile: 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 and let it go.
The show must go on.
— Queen