The 62 Hertz Indifference

The fluorescent light above my desk hums at a frequency that feels like it is trying to drill into my molars, a steady 62 hertz of corporate indifference. Echo G., our disaster recovery coordinator, is sitting three cubicles down, her eyes fixed on a dual-monitor setup that displays 22 different failure nodes in bright, unforgiving red. She is the person we call when the world ends, or at least when the database that stores every customer’s secret preference for gluten-free crust goes dark. But even Echo, with her capacity to manage 102 simultaneous system alerts, looks defeated by the PDF currently sitting in our shared inbox. It is the results of the ‘Annual Employee Engagement Pulse,’ a document that spans 42 pages of colorful charts that somehow manage to say absolutely nothing at all.

I can still feel the phantom vibration of my phone in my pocket. Ten minutes ago, I committed the ultimate modern sin. I was venting to a colleague about the absolute absurdity of these survey results, typing out a message that was far too honest for its own good. I meant to send it to Sarah in accounting. Instead, I sent it to Director Dave. My finger hit the ‘send’ icon with a finality that felt like a guillotine blade dropping. In that text, I called the town hall a ‘performative circle of decision laundering.’ Now, Dave is typing. I can see the three dots on my screen, bobbing like a buoy in a storm. My stomach is doing a slow, 32-degree tilt. I am waiting for the disaster to recover me.

The Ritual of Decision Laundering

This is where we find ourselves: in the feedback loop to nowhere. We are told that soliciting feedback is the hallmark of the modern, empathetic leader. We are invited into glass-walled conference rooms and offered 12 different varieties of herbal tea, only to be asked for our ‘unfiltered thoughts’ on a project that has already been greenlit, funded, and partially staffed. It is a ritual. It is a way for management to scrub their hands of the messy reality of unpopular decisions. If they ask us first, they can say they ‘listened.’ If they then proceed to do exactly what they planned, they can call it ‘balancing stakeholder needs.’

It is decision laundering-the process of taking a pre-determined, top-down mandate and running it through a cycle of employee consultation until it comes out looking like a collective agreement.

Echo G. finally stands up, stretching her arms until her joints pop. She knows about the text. I told her in a panicked whisper 2 minutes after it happened. She didn’t laugh; she just looked at her monitors and said, ‘At least when a server crashes, it doesn’t lie to you about why.’ She’s right. In disaster recovery, there is no room for laundering. If a backup fails, it fails because of a specific sequence of 52 errors or a single broken line of code. You can’t hold a town hall to convince the server that it’s actually working quite well. But in the human layer of the company, we spend 82% of our time pretending that the ‘Synergy Initiative’ wasn’t just a way to justify cutting the travel budget.

The Masterclass in Erasure

I remember the town hall where these survey results were first ‘socialized.’ That’s the word they used. You don’t present data anymore; you socialize it, as if the numbers are shy puppies that need to be introduced to the park. The room was packed with 212 people, all of us clutching lukewarm coffee. The presenter, a man whose teeth were so white they looked like they belonged in a museum, showed us a slide titled ‘Key Opportunities.’

Our feedback-specific, biting critiques of the new reporting software-had been aggregated, distilled, and bleached until it became: ‘Enhance Inter-departmental Synergy.’ It was a masterclass in erasure. We told them the tool didn’t work. They told us we needed to talk to each other more while using the tool that didn’t work.

It erodes something deep within the psyche of an organization when this happens. It’s not just about the bad software or the canceled holiday party. It’s about the theft of agency. When you ask someone for their opinion with no intention of using it, you are telling them that their intellect is a prop. You are saying that their experience is only valuable insofar as it provides a veneer of democracy for a dictatorship. I’ve seen 32 good people leave this department in the last 12 months, not because they found better-paying jobs, but because they grew tired of being asked to participate in their own gaslighting.

The Direct Confrontation

Echo G. comes over to my desk and leans on the partition. ‘Dave is calling a meeting for 2:02 PM,’ she says, glancing at her watch. ‘He didn’t look angry, but he looked… informed.’ I feel the 12 grams of lead in my chest sink lower. This is the moment where the laundering stops. My text was a direct violation of the ritual. I didn’t use the ‘anonymous’ portal. I didn’t couch my feedback in the soft, pillowy language of ‘constructive growth opportunities.’ I used the word ‘laundering.’ I used the word ‘farce.’ I used the word ‘cowardice’ in a way that left very little room for synergy.

But here is the contradiction: I am terrified of the meeting, yet I feel more alive than I have in 122 days. For the first time in my tenure here, I am not a data point in a rigged survey. I am a person who said a thing that is true. The feedback loop has been broken. It’s no longer going nowhere; it’s heading straight for Dave’s office, and while that might mean the end of my career here, it’s a relief to stop the spinning. We spend so much energy trying to navigate these fake structures that we forget what it feels like to just stand on solid ground, even if that ground is currently on fire.

I think about the 522 responses that went into that engagement survey. How many of them were screams for help that got translated into ‘Efficiency Gains’? How many people stayed up until 12 AM worrying about a project, only to see their concerns dismissed as ‘Resistance to Change’? It’s a massive waste of human potential. We hire experts, coordinators like Echo, and specialists who know their craft, and then we ask them to play-act at being consulted. It’s like buying a 12-core processor and then using it only to run a screensaver. It’s an insult to the hardware.

The Genuine Disaster

In disaster recovery, Echo tells me, the first step is always ‘Acknowledge the State.’ If the server room is flooded, you don’t send out a survey asking people how they feel about the humidity. You get a pump. Corporate leadership needs to learn how to Acknowledge the State. If you are going to make a top-down decision, then make it. Be a leader. Own the consequences. Don’t drag 312 employees through a two-week ‘consultation phase’ just so you can sleep better at night. People can handle an unpopular truth. What they can’t handle is a popular lie.

As I walk toward Dave’s office at exactly 2:02 PM, I see the printout of the ‘Inter-departmental Synergy’ slide pinned to the breakroom wall. Someone has drawn a tiny, 2-inch frowny face in the corner. It’s the most honest thing in the whole building. I take a deep breath, adjust my collar, and knock on the door.

‘So,’ Dave says, finally. ‘Tell me more about this laundering process.’

And for the first time, I think he might actually be listening. We are no longer in the loop to nowhere. We are finally somewhere, even if that somewhere is a place where I might need to update my resume by the end of the day. But at least I won’t have to use the word synergy ever again.