When “Phones Are All That Matter” Became the Sun of the Office

If we look closely at the suburban workplace, we find a curious courtship ritual: promotions awarded for plumage rather than performance. One young supervisor rose not on spreadsheets but on the two feathers every ecosystem respects—friendship with the boss and the inexplicable talent for giving relationship advice. The habitat adjusted.

Then came the proclamation—simple, absolute, and inevitable:

“Phones are all that matter.”

Here, at last, we witness a textbook response. The staff, with the solemnity of a flock obeying migration cues, complied with machine-like precision: phones answered, ringing met, scripts recited. Tickets collected dust like forgotten nests; provisioning of accounts (a commenter’s quiet note from the understory) went undone as the population funneled effort into the one glittering target.

This is Goodhart’s Law in a suit: when you crown a metric, the species adapts to the coronation. Homo supervisorus nepotisticus mandates the ringtone, Homo workerus literalus obliges—actions optimized for the measure, not the mission. The result is efficient on the surface and quietly catastrophic underneath, like a pond exquisitely polished but starved of oxygen.

If you want a lasting ecosystem, tend the whole web, not the loudest call. Declare a single ringtone your sun, and don’t be surprised when the rest of the office becomes nocturnal.