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.
