IT Wanted Process. They Got Panic.

A few years back, a Reddit user got shuffled from the “business side” into IT during a re-org. The official reason was “better alignment,” the unspoken one likely “this person is expensive.” So began a masterclass in bureaucratic jujitsu, where IT’s love for “process over results” became its own undoing.The user, now embedded, decided to give IT exactly what they asked for: process. Every single, painstaking step delivered with forensic precision. The predictable result? Not efficiency, but “panic,” according to the user. A system designed to streamline became a system choked by its own rules, proving that sometimes the best way to break something is to obey it perfectly.The internet, predictably, weighed in. The top comment, a genuine laugh, suggested a band name: “Panic at the Cisco.” A solid 1313 upvotes for that. But then, as is tradition, the discourse took a sharp turn into the bizarre. A significant faction of commenters, it turns out, believed the original post was AI-generated. Their primary evidence? The author’s consistent use of the em-dash. One user, Rhylian85, noted, with a hint of exasperation, “I am so bothered by the idea that only AI uses an emdash — I use them all the time!” Apparently, basic punctuation is now a Turing test.So, on one side, you have an IT department so obsessed with process that it self-sabotages into “panic.” On the other, a significant portion of the online populace so fixated on minor stylistic choices that they declare human writing to be artificial. Both scenarios, it seems, are a masterclass in missing the forest for the—well, for the em-dash. Perhaps the real “better alignment” was the shared human capacity for exquisite, self-inflicted chaos all along.