Category: Burnout Diaries

By Ken Hollow, unwilling hostage of the green dot Slack. Teams. Discord. Whatever flavor of chat tool your company forces upon you, they’re all the same: endless streams of pings, emojis, and unread channels masquerading as “collaboration.” In reality, they’re just corporate anxiety generators — little dopamine slot machines that ding every time your manager…

By Ken Hollow, reluctant attendee of frosting purgatory There are few things more cursed in corporate life than the office birthday celebration. Not because anyone actually wants to celebrate, but because HR insists on scheduling mandatory joy in the form of stale cupcakes and off-key singing. It’s not a party. It’s a cupcake-based hostage situation.…

By Ken Hollow, reluctant protagonist in HR’s tragic novella Performance Improvement Plans — or PIPs, if you want to make them sound like a snack instead of a corporate guillotine — are HR’s favorite form of fanfiction. They’re not about helping you improve. They’re about writing a dramatic narrative where you’re the doomed hero, destined…

By Ken Hollow, unwilling time traveler through calendar chaos Project deadlines are fictional. They’re not based on reality, resources, or reason. They’re dates picked out of thin air by a manager who thinks slapping “Q3 Deliverable” on a calendar is the same as project planning. They’re made-up milestones we all pretend to chase until panic…

By Ken Hollow, unwilling author of receipt novels Expense reports are the worst kind of creative writing: bureaucratic fanfiction. You take mundane events — a taxi ride, a coffee, a hotel room — and rewrite them into tortured corporate prose that might, if the gods of accounting smile upon you, result in partial reimbursement six…

By Ken Hollow, unwilling data point in HR’s experiment Corporate obsession with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) has reached a new low: they’re no longer content measuring sales, clicks, or “engagement.” Now, management wants to quantify you. Happiness, creativity, culture — all reduced to colorful dashboards. Your soul is now a metric. The New Age of…

By Ken Hollow, reluctant commuter in pajama pants The great promise of remote work was freedom: no commute, no awkward breakroom small talk, no boss peering over your shoulder. Naturally, companies hated it. Enter the Return-to-Office mandate — the corporate equivalent of your parents telling you that “family dinners build character.” In reality, it’s just…

By Ken Hollow, reluctant goal-setter and spreadsheet victim Every January, normal people lie to themselves with New Year’s resolutions: “I’ll run every day. I’ll stop eating sugar. I’ll finally learn French.” By February, it’s over. Corporate life does the exact same thing, except it calls them OKRs — Objectives and Key Results — and wraps…

By Ken Hollow, reluctant translator of corporate Elvish Corporate jargon is less communication and more spellcasting. Nobody actually knows what half of it means, but if you chant it loudly in a meeting, you gain +3 charisma and temporary immunity from accountability. It’s not English. It’s a fantasy language pack, installed directly into PowerPoint and…

By Ken Hollow, unwilling trainee in email paranoia Corporate security training is the modern workplace’s favorite pastime. Not because it works, but because it wastes hours of your life while teaching you absolutely nothing — except that your employer really enjoys sending fake phishing emails just to watch you squirm. The Ritual of the Training…