Into this mist of melancholic management arrived Tam—a man burdened by clarity, afflicted by logic, and infected with the chronic condition of getting things done. No one was quite sure who hired him. Rumors swirled that a temp agency accidentally sent him over while trying to dispatch someone to fix the printer.
Tam’s first offense? He read the documentation. His second? He improved it. By the time he automated the department’s weekly performance report, Elias had already scheduled an urgent meeting titled “Preserving Human Dignity in the Age of Metrics.”
Tam spoke in statements instead of suggestions. He saw problems as things to solve, not opportunities to deepen interdepartmental empathy. Most shocking of all, he appeared to enjoy doing the work—a trait long since considered gauche in the upper circles of Office Spirituality.
Where Elias sighed, Tam coded. Where others made charts of feelings, Tam made tools. And when asked to estimate timelines, he responded with… dates. Actual dates. With numbers.
This made him a danger.
Soon, the emotionally calibrated began whispering behind curtains. "He’s very efficient, but is he emotionally present?" one asked. "He doesn’t even use ellipses in emails," said another, voice trembling.
Elias, threatened at the deepest level of his performative inertia, developed a new maneuver: the Silent Gaze of Passive Pity. It was deployed in Tam’s direction during meetings, followed by solemn questions like, "Tam, how are you really?"
Tam would reply with honest confusion, "Fine, why?"
And they would nod knowingly, as if he had confirmed their worst fears: the man was simply too okay to be trusted.
And so, Tam toiled in the twilight of projected trauma and circular empathy, building functional systems beneath the dripping ceiling of emotional condensation.
But even then, cracks had begun to show.
Some quietly used Tam’s tools. Secretly thanked him. Silently abandoned their sadness rituals.
And in the break room, someone dared to ask: "What if we just... fixed things?"
A silence fell over the office like a curtain drawn too quickly. The performance was faltering.
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