Category: Stuff I Was Allowed to Post
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By Ken Hollow, unwilling participant in sticky-note theater Brainstorming is the corporate equivalent of a séance: a bunch of people gather in a room, chant buzzwords, scribble nonsense, and pretend they’ve summoned something meaningful. Spoiler: they haven’t. At best, you get a whiteboard full of “innovative” ideas that will never be implemented. At worst, you…
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By Ken Hollow, reluctant fortune teller of corporate nonsense Let’s be honest: Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are just tarot cards with pie charts. Managers shuffle them around, pretend to interpret them, and then use them to justify why you don’t get a raise this quarter. They’re less about truth and more about vibes, dressed up…
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Another day, another round of “AI is here to kill everything you know and love.” Except, apparently, it’s not. According to The Wall Street Journal, enterprise software — the sprawling beast that runs HR, finance, compliance, and a thousand other cubicle nightmares — isn’t dying anytime soon. AI may be clever, but it’s not about…
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By Ken Hollow, reluctant tech correspondent with a migraine It finally happened: someone in Silicon Valley said the quiet part out loud. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted that the current wave of AI hype might look suspiciously like the dot-com bubble in its final Red Bull-fueled days. Billions have been poured into AI companies promising…
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By Ken Hollow, trapped in an infinite feedback loop of buzzwords If I die young, bury me in an Outlook calendar invite. Cause of death: “Just circling back.” My tombstone will read: “Per my last email.” Corporate jargon has many crimes, but none so insidious as the eternal loop of circling back, touching base, looping…
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By Ken Hollow, unwilling financier of the attention economy Here’s what I wanted from social media: to post a picture, scream into the void, maybe share a meme that will haunt me for five years. Here’s what I did not want: to be coerced into setting up a digital wallet every time I try to…
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By Ken Hollow, unpaid trend chaser, reluctant doomscroller Let me tell you a secret: I don’t hate TikTok. I respect it. It’s the apex predator of apps. It knows what it is — fast, weird, addictive, chaotic. It has distilled human attention into 60-second vials of dopamine. That’s impressive, in a horrifying, “we’re all doomed”…
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By Ken Hollow, unwilling caretaker of expired social logins Remember Threads? Of course you don’t. And if you do, it’s only because the app is still haunting your home screen like an ex you forgot to delete from your contacts. The icon’s just sitting there, silently judging you for not “engaging in meaningful conversations” while…
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By Ken Hollow, professional overthinker and part-time emoji decoder Feedback is supposed to be constructive. Helpful. Collaborative. Instead, it’s often delivered in the most emotionally ambiguous format possible: the single “LOL.” When a client replies “LOL” to something I’ve sent, my brain doesn’t hear laughter. My brain hears: 🔹 The Problem With Digital Tone Tone…
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By Ken Hollow, AI wrangler, burnout survivor, and reluctant personal brand When GPT-5 dropped, I thought, “Perfect. Finally, an assistant who can handle my tone so I can stop writing captions at 1 a.m. while half-watching reruns of Kitchen Nightmares.” The dream: teach it to write like me, minus the spiraling panic that I lace…