My insignificant working life and boredom ...

I started out in customer support.
And when things were slow, I helped the QA team run test cases.
I hated the job.
I was just a warm body in a chair, waiting for the day to end.

Support was simple.
Let the customers talk your ears off.
Pretend to care.
Then push them away with the classic excuse:
“You’re using the system wrong… it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.”

The developers weren’t supposed to be bothered.
So we played ticket ping-pong.
A file bounced from A to B to C until the customer got tired and closed it.
Victory through boredom.

QA was even worse.
Test cases with no errors could be checked off instantly.
So I checked them off.
Without running them.
Without guilt.

My coworkers didn’t last long.
Some tried to take the job seriously.
They all burned out and vanished like side characters in a dystopian pilot.
Others did nothing—like me—and survived a little longer.
But I was the only one who had been there from the beginning.

Most days felt like a bad remake of Office Space.
A morning standup where I lied through my teeth about “great progress.”
Then Zoom meetings where new projects were explained in mind-numbing detail.
I didn’t listen.
I didn’t care.

Afternoons were quiet.
I plugged in a USB stick that simulated mouse movements so my status always showed “active.”
Meanwhile, I scrolled the entire internet on my phone.
Sometimes I reached the bottom of the digital ocean and still felt bored.

I looked around the office.
Faces frozen in misery.
People staring at their screens like prisoners in 1984, waiting for Big Brother to blink.

My two monitors formed a fortress around me.
A tiny bunker.
Just in case an actual boss wandered in.
Hasn’t happened in years.

My direct supervisor spent most of his time taking photos of airplanes from his office window.
That was the extent of his management skills.

At first, I didn’t notice how the work in our department was changing.
Slowly.
Quietly.
Like the world in The Matrix, glitching one pixel at a time.

We were testing a new centralized management system.
It caused problems.
A lot of them.
I had no idea what it was really for — I never listened during project meetings — but apparently it was important.

The issue was access rights.
Important people suddenly had no access.
Nobodies like me had global admin permissions.
Tickets piled up on my desk.
Now I had to fix things.
Real work.
I hated it.

So I examined the system closely.
It ran somewhere in the cloud, mirrored across continents, hidden inside high-security data centers.
Failure-proof.
Untouchable.

New permissions were pushed through a sloppily written API.
I rewrote parts of it.
Added detailed logs.
I wanted to see which idiot kept breaking the access rights.
Because I was always the one forced to fix them.

To my surprise, I discovered something unsettling:
My coworkers did even less than I thought.
They did nothing.
Literally nothing.
No one touched the API except me.

The only way around the API was through physical access to the servers.
So someone in the data center was working against me.
But why?

I had been passive too long.
Somewhere between boredom and apathy, my curiosity woke up — sharp and dangerous like Neo waking up in the real world.

What was this system?
What was it doing?

I added more logs and scanned the access patterns.
The truth hit me like a plot twist in Enemy of the State.

The system processed large, shady payments.
Split them into tiny, harmless amounts.
Spread them across countless sub-accounts.

So many shell companies.
A global hydra.

Classic money laundering — the fuel of every major bank.
But my corporation had automated it.

Not surprising.
Not shocking.

But there was more.
Something hidden behind the curtain, humming like forbidden tech in Blade Runner.

I went back to doomscrolling.
More desperate influencers.
More brain-rotting content.

Then something caught my eye.
A protest.
A real one.

A small town whose school and kindergarten were falling apart.
Meanwhile, huge amounts of money flowed into a military base just outside the town.

The opposition was furious.
Young activists uploaded clever, creative videos.
I watched them all.

Next day.
Standup.
Tickets.
Still no bug found.
Test cases faked.
Lunch.
And then: pure boredom again.

I checked the protest.
It should’ve blown up overnight.

But nothing.
Not a trace.

Every video was gone.
Every account deleted.
Like the activists never existed.

No local news.
No blogs.
No whispers.

I contacted a guy I vaguely knew from a group chat.
He was confused too.
He had moved away for university but still followed things in his hometown.
He had reshared his friends’ videos.
Now all his posts showed dead links leading nowhere.
He couldn’t reach his friends.

He promised to keep me updated.
I felt a chill.
A 1984 chill.
Big Brother tapping me on the shoulder.

I opened my massive logs again.
I filtered out the money-laundering.
Old news.
The rest was still huge.
Still strange.

Then a disturbing idea hit me.

The system scanned the internet.
Looked for spikes of activity.
If it was harmless entertainment, it amplified it.
More users.
More noise.

But if it was political…
critical…
dangerous…

It buried it.
Flooded it with fake news.
Turned everything into static until people gave up.

And there it was in my logs.
Cold.
Precise.
Mechanical.

Yesterday’s protest flagged as “highly critical.”
Neutralized by force.

Accounts erased.
Posts removed.
Visibility throttled.
Attention redirected to cat videos.

But something didn’t fit.

Hardcore activists don’t disappear.
They respawn.
New accounts.
New networks.
Especially the hacktivist circles outside BigTech control — the digital resistance, the kids from Mr. Robot.
They should’ve screamed censorship from the rooftops.

But they were silent too.

Why would a global corporation crush a protest in a tiny, irrelevant town?
Schools are underfunded everywhere.
This was nothing special.

It was like using a missile to kill a mosquito.
Illogical.
Dangerous.
Risking the Streisand Effect.
Making a scandal bigger by trying to hide it.

But the scandal didn’t grow.
It vanished.

So I looked closer at the military base.
The one swallowing every budget around it like a black hole.
The one the activists said was drowning in money.

And suddenly, the whole world felt like a simulation glitching around me.

#story #work #job #economy #technology #software #system #matrix #politics #business

Hmm, moim zdaniem to nie jest dobry pomysł, to przyciąganie na siłę wszystkich nowych osób zakładających profil przez apkę #Android na instancję mastodon.social

Ciężko teraz dogrzebać się do serwera działającego w ojczystym języku, a mastodon.social puchnie. Dopiero co się z niego przeniosłem na pol.social, bo ciężko było używać przez lagi, opóźnienia i błędy 500 w przeglądarce.

Chyba że pan Gargron chce zniechęcić ludzi do #Mastodon pokazując jak powoli działa?🤔

Ech, zamiast #decentralizacja, kolejna wielka instancja. Przykład #matrix.org chyba poszedł na marne...

Więcej -> https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/110236405361940166

#MastodonMigration #ExiTT

Aral Balkan

2023-04-21 10:47:36

Dear @Gargron,

Please reevaluate your decision to incentivise centralisation on mastodon.social in the official app.

This is the sort of design a VC-funded startup would implement, not a non-profit acting in the interests of a healthy commons.

I’m sure you don’t want mastodon.social to become mini-Twitter and you don’t want to become mini-Musk.

That’s not how we win this.

More instances, not larger instances is the key.

https://mastodon.ar.al/@feditips@mstdn.social/110233282943673558

#decentralisation #fediverse #staySmall