You told them to log everything? Congratulations, you created a functionally inert paperclip machine.

The new supervisor emailed: “From now on, every task you do must be logged in the system. Every single one. No exceptions.” That’s not an instruction so much as a provocation—like putting a speedrun timer in front of people who work in cubicles.

They complied with surgical accuracy. Sample entries (authentic, I can tell):

• 09:00 — Seated at desk. Chair adjusted. (Duration: 7 seconds)
• 09:02 — Thought about coffee. Did not act. Logged thought.
• 09:03 — Logged that thought about coffee. If you’re thinking you’ve seen this before, you have (comments are unified: “Already seen this story,” “I logged everything down to the minute,” and the ever-helpful “AI Bot”). The predictable part is the trope; the delicious part is the execution. Management asked for data; people delivered a data set that reads like an inventory of human tedium.

Root-cause analysis: manager wanted accountability; staff delivered literal accountability. The reports that land on the boss’s desk are verbose, precise, and entirely unhelpful (12,482 entries for “breath,” one for “sigh,” one for “logged the logging”). He asked for every single task. He got every single task—and a lesson in why phrasing matters.