The cursor blinks. It’s the only thing moving. On screen, a woman named Janice, whose voice has the manufactured cheerfulness of a hostage video, is on slide 232 of a presentation about ‘synergistic asset allocation.’ This is hour number 4.2 of a mandatory 2-hour training for Project Fusion, the new platform that cost the company a reported $2,222,222. My diaphragm just did that weird little jump thing it does right before you get the hiccups. It’s an involuntary flutter of impending, repetitive doom.

Janice clicks through 22 separate screens to demonstrate how to log a single customer phone call. A field labeled ‘Interaction Vector’ must be populated from a dropdown with 82 choices, none of which are ‘phone call.’ She chooses ‘Synchronous Vocalization Event.’ In the Microsoft Teams chat, a rebellion is brewing in the form of silence, punctuated only by a single, glorious act of defiance: a junior analyst named Raj quietly posts a direct link to the old Google Sheet. The one that worked.

We love to believe in magic. We believe that an expensive, complicated tool can perform an exorcism on our messy, complicated processes. We anoint consultants as priests, we burn sage in the server room, and we chant the mantra of ‘digital transformation.’ But the software isn’t the exorcist. The software is just the holy water. And if you splash holy water on a demon, all you get is a wet, angry demon. The problem was never the spreadsheet. The problem was that our workflow was a chaotic, ten-headed hydra of approvals and legacy policies that no one had the courage to actually fight. So, instead of slaying the beast, we bought it a $2.2 million diamond collar.

Now, I’ve been that person. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I once championed a system just like this. I sat through the demo, mesmerized by the smooth animations and the customizable dashboards. I saw the future. I told my director, “This will solve our data integrity issues.” What I failed to see was that our data integrity issues weren’t a technology problem. They were a human problem. We had 2 departments who hated each other, actively sabotaging each other’s inputs for years. The new software didn’t force them to collaborate. It just gave them a more sophisticated, auditable way to continue their little war. My diagnosis was a catastrophic failure. I prescribed an MRI for a broken heart.

It’s an interesting sort of corporate superstition. We avoid the hard, slow, human work of untangling our own messes, and instead, we purchase an indulgence. A technological get-out-of-jail-free card. We think a new user interface will somehow fix a decade of departmental mistrust. It’s like trying to fix a faulty electrical grid by giving everyone a brighter lightbulb. The lightbulb will just flicker more dramatically before it blows.

I was talking to a man named Carter M.-C. the other day. He’s a playground safety inspector, a job that sounds simple until you hear him talk about it for more than 2 minutes. He doesn’t use any fancy apps or drones. He has a clipboard, a measuring tape, and a little metal tool that looks like a hood ornament, designed to simulate the dimensions of a child’s head and neck to check for entrapment risks. He told me he failed 22 playgrounds last year. Not for rust or broken swings, but for the depth of the wood chips. The specification calls for 12 inches of uncompressed fiber. “People see the brand-new slide,” he said, “but they don’t see the 2 inches of compacted mulch underneath. They buy the flashy thing and ignore the foundation. But the fall is what gets you. The foundation is the only thing that matters in the end.”

He doesn’t sell a solution. He performs a diagnosis. He spends his days looking for the invisible failures, the foundational cracks beneath the shiny new paint. He understands that what you see is the least important part. And we, in our glass-walled offices, do the exact opposite. We purchase gleaming digital facades to cover up rotting structural beams. We’d rather have a beautiful, confusing dashboard that shows us nothing than a simple, ugly spreadsheet that tells us the truth. The chaos of 17 dropdown menus on a single screen is a deliberate distraction. It’s visual noise designed to make you feel like something profound is happening. You look at it, and it feels important, but it communicates nothing. Then you look at something clear, like a laser cut wooden maps on an office wall, and every single etched line has a purpose. It reveals the world with elegant simplicity, no pop-ups required.

This whole obsession with digitizing everything feels like my disastrous attempt at homebrewing. I was convinced that if I just bought enough expensive equipment, I could make great beer. I got the stainless steel conical fermenter for $872, the digital temperature controller, the oxygenation wand. My first batch tasted like burnt bread and regret. I had all the gear in the world, but I had no respect for the process. I didn’t understand yeast health. I didn’t understand fermentation schedules. I thought technology could let me skip the hard part of learning and paying attention. The gear didn’t make better beer. It just allowed me to make terrible beer with a higher degree of precision. Project Fusion is that $872 fermenter. It’s a precision instrument for executing our flawed, nonsensical process.

Of course, we have to evolve. Stagnation is a death sentence in any industry. But this isn’t evolution. This frantic crusade to digitize every broken piece of our workflow is the most expensive form of stagnation I’ve ever witnessed. It’s putting things in amber. Before Project Fusion, when a weird edge case came up, someone could just add a column to the Google Sheet. It was messy, but it was adaptable. It was alive. Now, to change a single field requires a ticket, a review by a committee that meets every 2 weeks, and a $12,000 change order to the vendor. We haven’t improved the process; we’ve fossilized its flaws. We’ve made it harder to do the right thing and impossible to do the wrong thing that is sometimes necessary to get the job done. The old spreadsheet was a dirt path, shaped by the feet of the people who actually walked it. Project Fusion is a 12-lane superhighway built over the top of it, but with all the exits leading back to the toll booth.

So here we are, 42 of us on a call, watching Janice demonstrate how to perform a task that used to take 12 seconds and now takes 12 minutes. The hiccup feeling is back. A tiny, rhythmic, internal failure. And in the chat, the link to that old Google Sheet is getting passed around in private messages. A digital speakeasy. A quiet, shared understanding that the new, beautiful, expensive world is broken, and the only way to survive is to keep the old, simple, functional one alive in the shadows.