The Courier and the Code

Fatima T.-M. doesn’t have this luxury. I met her at a loading dock last Tuesday while I was waiting for a delivery that was ‘stuck in the logistics pipeline.’ Fatima is a medical equipment courier. Her world is measured in 16-minute windows and the precise weight of cardiac monitors. When I asked her if she ever ‘synergized’ with her dispatch team, she looked at me as if I had just spoken in ancient Sumerian. To Fatima, language is a tool of survival. If she says ‘the heart valve is on the way,’ it means exactly that. There is no ‘leveraging of cross-functional assets’ in her van. There is only a girl, a steering wheel, and 26 packages that need to be in 26 different places before the surgeons scrub in. Her clarity is a rebuke to everything I do between 9 AM and 5 PM.

We think this obfuscation is harmless, but the decay of language is the first sign of a dying culture. When we can no longer call a mistake a mistake, we lose the ability to fix it. We become a company of ghosts, drifting through corridors, ‘touching base’ and ‘circling back’ until the sun goes down and we can go home to our real lives. I find myself wondering when we decided that being ‘professional’ meant losing our ability to speak like human beings. Why is it that the more ‘senior’ a person becomes, the less likely they are to use a verb that actually describes a physical action?

The Unspoken Rule

I remember a time when ‘disruption’ meant someone had interrupted your train of thought. Now, it’s a goal. We want to ‘disrupt the market,’ which is usually just a fancy way of saying we want to sell the same thing as everyone else but with a slightly more annoying website. We are 76 days into the new fiscal year, and I have yet to hear a single person say ‘I don’t know.’ It’s a forbidden phrase. You aren’t allowed to not know. You have to ‘perform a deep dive’ or ‘socialize the data points’ until the ignorance is sufficiently buried under a pile of adjectives.

In a world where we spend 36 hours a week trying to ‘circle back’ on ‘deliverables,’ there is something deeply restorative about a place where the rules are fixed and the objective is visible. I found myself thinking about this while watching a match at the

Pickleball Athletic Club. There, you don’t ‘optimize the trajectory of the sphere to maximize competitive advantage.’ You just hit the ball over the net. There is a line, there is a kitchen, there is a score. If you hit it out, it’s out. There are no ‘paradigm shifts’ that can save a bad serve. The honesty of the game is an antidote to the 116 emails I have waiting in my inbox, all of which use the word ‘urgent’ to describe things that are objectively trivial.

Maybe the reason we love these clear-cut activities-sports, gardening, peeling an orange in one piece-is because they provide the feedback loops our jobs deny us. In the office, I can ‘strategize’ for 66 days and still have no idea if I’ve actually helped anyone. On the court, or in Fatima’s delivery van, the reality of the work is undeniable. You can’t hide behind jargon when you’re chasing a ball or delivering a ventilator. The physical world doesn’t care about your ‘core competencies.’ It only cares if you show up and do the thing you said you were going to do.

The Self-Imposed Tax

I’ve spent the last 26 minutes of this meeting counting the number of times the CEO says the word ‘pivot.’ He’s at 16. If he hits 26, I’m going to stand up and walk out, but I know I won’t. I’ll stay here, I’ll take my notes, and I’ll send an email later ‘aligning’ myself with his ‘vision.’ I am part of the problem. I am a willing participant in the linguistic theater that is slowly strangling the soul out of our work. We are all so afraid of appearing simple that we have become incomprehensible.

There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from translating human thoughts into corporate-speak. It’s a mental tax that we all pay, leaving us too tired to actually innovate. We talk about ‘innovation’ more than we actually do it. We have 6 committees dedicated to innovation, which is the surest way to ensure that nothing new ever happens. True innovation is usually messy, loud, and described in very simple words. It’s not ‘leveraging assets’; it’s ‘building a better mousetrap.’

Fatima T.-M. once told me about a time she had to deliver a 56-pound piece of equipment through a snowstorm. She didn’t call her boss to talk about ‘weather-related headwinds.’ She called and said, ‘The roads are shit, I’m going to be 16 minutes late, but I’m coming.’ That’s it. That’s the whole story. No one had to ask for clarification. No one needed a follow-up deck. The information was transmitted, the reality was acknowledged, and the work continued. I want to live in a world that speaks like Fatima. I want to work in a place where we can say ‘this plan isn’t working’ without needing to ‘re-contextualize the roadmap.’

The Heavy Life Jacket

As the meeting finally winds down at the 56-minute mark, the CEO asks if there are any questions. The silence is heavy. We are all imagining the 86 emails we need to answer. I look at my orange peel, now slightly dried on the edges. I think about the 16 different ways I could have spent this hour that would have actually added value to the world. I could have helped Fatima load her van. I could have practiced my serve. I could have just sat in silence and tried to remember what my own voice sounds like when it isn’t filtered through a professional mask.

But the life jacket is getting heavy. The words are starting to pull us under. One of these days, the projector is going to die, the slides will vanish, and we’ll be left sitting in the dark, forced to actually talk to each other. I hope when that day comes, we still remember how.