// What lengths might workers go to for a break when everyone is online all the time, companies demand increased output, and managers are desperate to demonstrate impact and drive their teams to work harder, and LLMs enable generalists to question the work of specialists?
[20 months in the future…]
Cory sips from the cup of coffee, sighing as they close their eyes for a moment to savor a moment of peace. <Ding> goes their phone; another notification that their boss is adding comments to the proposal. Cory looks at the time, 11pm on Saturday, and shakes their head. It won’t let up.
Cory’s boss Riley is on the career treadmill, striving to get promoted to Senior Director. Thanks to having kids, living in Palo Alto, and general lifestyle inflation, they are always pushing, pushing, pushing. The other Directors are doing the same, in a classic Red Queen’s race. So Riley bears down on their team, expecting them to work as hard as they are and respond to comments and questions immediately.
Cory pulls up “The Tally”, a running timestamped list of every single micromanaging event by Riley. The mean time between requests has steadily been shrinking. At least two every weekend. At least five after 10pm during the week. Sure Riley could be using AI to time these posts and pings, but the only person who saw these items were Cory and her team. Riley’s boss only saw Riley’s version of finished presentations, proposals, and reviews. The work of Cory and their team was sanitized away.
<Ding> goes the phone. Another one. Cory growls in frustration, a tear forming in their eye. <Ding> Something inside of them shifts and a look of determination settles onto their face. They pick up their personal phone, not connected to any of their company’s services or systems, and dial the number of an old school friend.
“Diego! I need your help. That thing you do? I… I… I need it. Can you send me the info? Thanks”
<Bong> A message appears on Cory’s personal phone.
“Welcome to DBaaS - Distracting Bosses as a Service
“Need your boss to stop micromanaging you? Want the notifications to stop? Need time to do actual work rather than asking “how high” when someone says “jump”? We’ve got you covered. We don’t hurt people, we distract them.
“We have a variety of options available. Send us the socials and LinkedIn of your target. We find weak lines in their social graph, define any limited hobbies they may have, analyze their posts for promising interest areas with opportunities for ‘engagement’, along with their likes and follows to see which categories of leaders they admire.
Services include:
Hobbies: Introducing them to a new time consuming and competitive hobby like rock climbing or scuba diving
Charity: Bringing them into the world of conspicuous charity giving, where being at the right galas and schmoozing at the right resorts will take up time they previously spent on work
Politics: Depending on your boss’ interests, we can ramp up their awareness of issues they will find quite vexing, prompting them to get much more involved, spending their precious time to talk to politicians, and not to you.
Dating: Is your boss single? We can help fix that.
Our more ‘aggressive’ approaches include:
Phone glitching: We’ll make it so your boss’ phone starts having problems connecting to wifi
Gigride disruption: Boss using their Uber or Lyft to launch a thousand pings? We’ll either prevent it from showing up in the first place or get the driver to spray some of our special formula in the car to induce motion sickness when looking at a screen
Plane wifi disablement: Let us make sure that your boss cannot connect to wifi on that trip from SFO to London
Home power outage: Just disabling home network access isn’t sufficient for the corp executive, they’ll just be on their phone, pinging away. We’ll take down all the power.