"Phones Are All That Matter": An Office Wildlife Documentary

Listen closely: in the suburban savanna of cubicles you can hear a rare, single-line directive—“Phones are all that matter.”

Here, a newly promoted supervisor—elevated not for metrics but for companionship and the curious talent of dispensing relationship advice to the boss—establishes a new ecological rule. If we look closely, the staff respond with the elegant cruelty of nature: they do exactly what is asked. Calls are answered with ritual precision; tickets, account provisioning, and the messy business of actually solving things are treated like unattractive nesting material and politely ignored. One veteran noted they stepped out of the queue to provision accounts, only to be beckoned back by the siren call of the handset.

A quiet chorus of observers summons Goodhart’s Law—“when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”—and the lesson blooms: metrics are prey and predators both. For a blissful season the phones sang; the leaderboard sparkled; customers still waited. The ecosystem adjusted, not by fixing broken burrows but by answering rings. If you return next month you will find the same species, altered slightly by incentive, chasing whatever shiny number the supervisor chooses to admire next.