There’s a romanticized image of “working in digital marketing” that gets passed around on LinkedIn — all minimalist coffee shops, sleek laptops, and people in turtlenecks nodding thoughtfully over pie charts. In this fantasy, you spend your days “driving engagement” and “leveraging data,” occasionally pausing to sip an oat latte and update your personal brand with something insightful.
In reality?
It’s me, in sweatpants, at 3:42 p.m., trying to explain to an app — for the fifth time — that when I say “schedule for Tuesday at 3 PM,” I mean my Tuesday at my 3 PM. Not Thursday in UTC. Not “three-ish” in whatever dystopian timezone your developer was in when they wrote this feature.
And certainly not with a random pixelated meme from 2018 attached.
🔹 The Lost Art of Just Doing the Thing
Somewhere along the line, software stopped being tools and started being co-workers. And not the good kind. The kind who nod during a meeting, claim they “totally get it,” and then deliver something that makes you wonder if they were in an entirely different meeting altogether.
Example:
I tell a project management app to “duplicate this task and assign it to John.” Reasonable. Clear. Foolproof.
What I get: a copy of the task assigned to… me. With a due date of “someday,” a priority tag of “low,” and a helpful note saying “John?” as if the app is personally asking me to confirm whether John exists.
This is my life now — the world’s most exhausting game of telephone where I’m on both ends of the call.
🔹 The Negotiation Phase
The trouble is, software doesn’t actually learn in the way we do. It pretends to. It remembers the wrong details with startling precision. Tell it to stop auto-formatting phone numbers into dates and it’ll smile, nod, and never stop.
Google Sheets, I’m looking at you.
I’ve spent a shameful amount of time begging spreadsheets to let me keep a number as a number. The moment I enter “01/08” as part of a client’s campaign ID, Sheets transforms into a smug little bureaucrat and says, “Ah yes, August 1st, 2025, I know exactly what you meant.”
I didn’t mean that.
I didn’t mean that at all.
But here’s the worst part — when I finally wrestle the formatting into submission, I feel victorious. Which is insane, because I shouldn’t have to fight this hard to make a machine do the thing I told it to do in the first place.
🔹 The Gaslighting Effect
When you spend enough time correcting apps, you start doubting yourself.
Did I really click the right option?
Did I misread that checkbox?
Was “Don’t Crop” somehow actually a euphemism for “Crop, but aggressively, and maybe also add a random filter just for fun”?
Instagram, for example, has a special talent for this. Select “original aspect ratio,” and you’d think — silly you — that your photo will be posted as-is. Nope. You’ll get an unrequested zoom into your subject’s left eyebrow, plus a subtle saturation boost that makes everyone look like they’re auditioning for a role as “person who lives entirely inside a tanning bed.”
The software isn’t broken, exactly — it’s just interpretive. It’s doing a little jazz riff on your instructions.
🔹 The Stockholm Syndrome Kicks In
And yet, on the rare occasion an app does exactly what I ask, without embellishment, without interpretation, without a detour through another dimension — I feel grateful.
Grateful.
Think about that.
We’re at a point where I thank the machines for simply doing their job.
This is how they win. Not with an uprising, not with killer robots, but by lowering our expectations so gradually that we start throwing them a parade for not actively making our lives harder.
🔹 Apps Have the Memory of a Goldfish (and the Petty Vendetta of a Scorned Lover)
Every marketing platform I’ve worked with has one fatal flaw: it can’t remember my preferences across more than three logins.
Every. Single. Time. I have to re-select my default fonts in Canva, my preferred time zone in scheduling tools, my saved filters in analytics dashboards.
It’s 2025. I can buy a fridge that live-streams its contents to my phone, but I can’t get a social media scheduling tool to remember that I don’t want push notifications.
And God forbid you use two similar tools from the same company. Change a setting in one, and the other will interpret that as a personal insult and promptly reset every customization you’ve ever made.
🔹 Half My Job Is Tech Support for Myself
Sometimes I think if I just recorded myself giving instructions once, and played it back to every app I opened, I’d save hours. But no — each platform insists on being wooed individually, like some Victorian courtesan who needs you to write her a handwritten letter just to confirm dinner plans.
The day I realized this was my entire workflow, I felt something inside me break.
You think you’re a strategist, a creative, a marketer. In reality, you’re a full-time interpreter between human intention and code-based obstinance. Your creative ideas are just the opening act; the main event is a multi-hour battle to get the damn thing published without the wrong logo, the wrong size, or a surprise typo introduced by “helpful” autocorrect.
🔹 The Endless Loop
Here’s how it usually goes:
- Give software a simple instruction.
- Receive an output so wildly off-base you briefly wonder if you’ve accidentally opened the wrong project entirely.
- Correct the mistake.
- Software changes something else that was fine before.
- Repeat until deadline panic overrides perfectionism.
It’s like babysitting a toddler who insists on “helping” you bake cookies, except the toddler is invisible, the cookies are client deliverables, and somehow the toddler has the power to rearrange your entire kitchen without asking.
🔹 And Yet… We Keep Coming Back
The sickest part of all of this? I’ll complain, I’ll rant, I’ll threaten to “just do it manually,” and yet… I keep using the software.
Why? Because it’s still faster than doing everything from scratch.
Because I need it.
Because my job depends on it.
That’s the final stage of software dependence — when you accept the friction as part of the process, like a sailor accepting that yes, the sea will try to kill you sometimes, but you still need the boat.
🔹 Conclusion: I’m Basically the Horse Whisperer for Apps
If you ever want to know what modern digital work is really like, picture this: me, sitting in front of a glowing screen, murmuring reassurances to an algorithm like it’s a skittish racehorse.
“It’s okay. We’re going to schedule this post. On Tuesday. No, this Tuesday. Good… good… now don’t touch anything else…”
Sometimes I think my job title should just be Software Negotiator. Or maybe Chief Digital Therapist. Because when you strip away the buzzwords, the core of what I do is simple:
I explain things to machines.
They misunderstand.
And then I explain it again.
Rinse. Repeat. Billable hours.
Hi. I’m Ken. I run Two Second Solutions, a one-man agency that somehow landed a fox spirit influencer as a client. I drink too much coffee, blog when I need to vent, and regularly update my résumé just in case she sets the office on fire again. I’m not crying — it’s just spell residue.