The click of the mouse sounds different the 41st time. It’s no longer a crisp, decisive action; it’s a dull thud, the sound of a bone weary from striking a wall. My wrist aches. On the screen, the loading spinner, a serene blue circle, completes its 11th rotation before redirecting me from ‘Workday’ back to the ‘PeopleSoft’ login page I started on 31 minutes ago. To get here, I first had to connect to the VPN, which triggered a ‘Duo’ push notification on my phone, which I approved, only to land on a dashboard where the ‘Request Parental Leave Adjustment’ button is a shade of grey that screams impotence.

This isn’t a glitch. I’ve come to believe this with a certainty that feels almost religious. A glitch is an error, an unforeseen break in the code. This is not broken. This is working exactly as intended. This labyrinth of logins and non-functional buttons wasn’t designed for my efficiency. It was designed for the organization’s insulation. It’s a digital moat, filled not with water but with error messages and circular redirects, engineered to keep the messy, inconvenient, and deeply human needs of the workforce from ever reaching the castle keep. It’s a buffer built of bad UI.

The Monument to Nuance vs. Interchangeability

I was thinking about this while looking up a man I met last week, a stained glass conservator named Felix J.D. His online portfolio was sparse, but the work was staggering. He restores medieval church windows. He spends his days handling fragile, irreplaceable panes of glass created in 1391, mixing putty with powders whose names haven’t been spoken aloud in centuries. His hands, he mentioned, are insured for a baffling sum of money. Imagine Felix trying to use this system. Imagine him logging into ‘SynergyPortal’ to update his list of professional competencies. He needs to add ‘Saddler’s Putty Formulation’ and ‘Dutchman Repair on Fractured Panes.’ The dropdown menu offers him ‘Advanced Excel,’ ‘Agile Scrum Methodology,’ and ‘Synergistic Marketing.’ There is no box for ‘Other.’ There is no phone number to call. There is only a chatbot icon in the corner named ‘Sparky’ that, when clicked, offers him a list of 101 irrelevant FAQ articles.

Felix’s entire profession is a monument to nuance, to the value of the specific, the irreplaceable. These systems are a monument to the opposite. They are built on the brutal logic of interchangeability. An employee is a unit. A need is a ticket. A life event is a dropdown selection. The goal is not to solve Felix’s problem; the goal is to categorize his problem so it can be routed to a queue where it will sit for 201 business hours before being automatically closed due to inactivity.

The Illusion of Control

And here’s the part that sticks in my throat: I once helped build one of these things. It was a much smaller monstrosity, a glorified email filter for a finance department, but I was so proud of it. I wrote a detailed memo, complete with charts, explaining how my automated routing script would save the company an estimated 21 man-hours per month. I felt like a genius of efficiency. It never occurred to me that a vendor with a genuinely unique invoicing issue-one that didn’t fit my prescribed keyword schema-would have their frantic emails silently archived into a digital void. I didn’t see the person on the other end; I only saw the problem of an overflowing inbox. I optimized for the database, not the desperate human being trying to get paid.

It’s the illusion of control while offering none.

We build these digital structures like we build cheap apartment buildings, not like we build cathedrals. The people who built Chartres worked with the stone they had, imperfections and all. They understood its grain, its weaknesses, its soul. They made mistakes, and those mistakes are now part of the building’s hallowed character. Our software architects aim for a flawless, sterile perfection, a system with no unpredictable variables. The result is a brittle facade that shatters the moment a real, messy human like Felix, or me, or you, interacts with it. We try to request leave because our child has an ear infection that requires a specialist 111 miles away, and the system asks us to select from ‘Vacation,’ ‘Sick Day,’ or ‘Jury Duty.’ My life doesn’t fit the dropdown. Nobody’s does.

Management by Attrition and the Unwinnable Game

This is management by attrition. The goal is to make the process of asking so soul-crushingly difficult that you simply give up. You won’t take the extra parental leave day. You’ll pay out-of-pocket for the expense that should have been covered. You’ll use a vacation day instead of a sick day because that button actually works. The system records your choice not as a failure of its own design but as a success in resource management. A report gets generated. A key performance indicator is met. Someone, somewhere, gets a bonus of $17,101 for implementing such an ‘efficient’ process.

It is, in essence, a game you are forced to play but can never, ever win. The rules are hidden, the objectives are contradictory, and the house has programmed the dealer to always have 21. It’s the antithesis of what a fair or engaging system should be. You’re just looking for a clear interface, a responsive command, a feeling that your actions have predictable consequences. That’s the core of any respectable user experience, the simple contract of input and output that people seek out when they want a reprieve from the chaos. It’s why a well-designed entertainment portal like Gobephones can feel more honest than a corporate benefits platform; it, at least, is upfront about its purpose and its rules. One system is designed for your engagement; the other is designed for your surrender.

The Digital Moat and Dehumanization

And so the dehumanization is completed, transaction by transaction. Your desperate need to fix a health insurance error that resulted in a bill for $11,001 becomes Ticket #HR-8675309-1. It is stripped of its terror, its urgency, its humanity. It is now just data. The language the system uses to communicate with you is a masterclass in this stripping process. “Your request has been received.” “Your ticket has been escalated.” “We are experiencing higher-than-normal volumes.” These are not sentences of communication; they are shields of deflection. They are the textual equivalent of a blank stare.

I minimize the browser window. The grey button is still there, still mocking me. Outside my actual window, the sun is hitting the trees. I think of Felix J.D., alone in his workshop. He’s probably holding a piece of 701-year-old glass up to the light, a shard of cobalt blue swirled with the imperfections of its long-dead creator. He’s measuring it, feeling its edges, understanding its unique place in the universe. He’ll spend the next 11 hours cutting a piece of lead came to hold it, his work slow, deliberate, and entirely human. He will not log his progress in a portal. He will not tag his labor with a project code. His submission will be the quiet click as the glass settles perfectly into place, a problem solved not by a system, but by a soul.