It began on a Tuesday. That most unremarkable of weekdays, wedged between the trauma of Monday and the false hope of Wednesday. A day, like many others, where nothing should happen—except it did. Someone ran a report.
Not just any report. A data-driven one. With graphs. Real graphs.
The report showed, in cold unfeeling Helvetica, that Tam’s contributions had quietly improved system uptime by 97%, reduced passive-aggressive ticket escalations by 83%, and had—most heinously—removed the need for weekly “synergy summits.”
The findings hit Elias like an unscheduled performance review.
He stared at the screen as if betrayed by his own reflection. “This data,” he muttered, “lacks context.”
Cassandra clutched her lavender-scented stress crystal. “It’s empirical,” she whispered, as though naming a demon.
The panic spread like mindfulness brochures at a leadership retreat. Metrics. Charts. Clear cause-and-effect. All the beautiful fog they’d cultivated was evaporating under the heat of functional infrastructure.
Elias convened the Emergency Committee for Narrative Control. Its mission: reinterpret the numbers into a format less threatening—ideally a mural.
But Tam had already emailed the board. He hadn’t meant to. It was just a summary of weekly tasks with attached logs and uptime reports. But the board, having not attended a single Trust Circle, simply mistook competence for leadership.
In one meeting, a decision was made. Without a vote. Without a circle. Without even a pebble.
Tam was promoted.
The response was swift and deeply emotional.
Elias shaved his beard (grown solely for “wisdom energy”). Cassandra went on a self-discovery sabbatical to the janitor’s closet. HR issued a department-wide invitation to “feel together or fall apart.”
A funeral was held—for the idea of vague intentions. Eulogies were whispered in prose-poetry format. Someone wore black, though only ironically.
And through it all, Tam continued to show up. Kept things running. Listened politely. Ignored performative breakdowns unless they involved actual servers.
He had no interest in titles, in “emotional horizontality,” or in policies about emotional humidity levels.
All he wanted… was for things to work.
And that, in the end, is what broke them.
Not malice. Not confrontation. But the gentle, inexorable decay of dysfunction when exposed to quiet competence.
Let me know when you want Chapter 5 — maybe "The Great Decommissioning of Pretend"?
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