The Ghost Who Lives In SlackInternal HR received reports that Director Yoshiko was working too much. At any hour, Slack was green. A message always came back within a minute. Colleagues used the word uncanny. Some of them believed she was running an auto-reply bot.

We tied her to a chair and interviewed her, gently. She had not been running a bot. From after eighteen hundred until nine the next morning she had simply been at work. The machine logs showed a further abnormality: she would watch a colleague’s keystrokes on the screen for about fifteen minutes at a stretch.

It has been a year since her colleagues began to fear the ghost that stayed lit in Slack. For otiose corp., whose motto is not to work, and for Internal HR as its guardian, this is a source of shame.

Destroying The Identity Of WorkA month ago we told her, very mildly, that continuous duty of more than six hours would be treated as grounds for dismissal. Reports from colleagues after that showed no improvement. In the small hours she would discover some plausible catastrophe, gather a crowd of coworkers, and play the hero until it was solved.

Work is her identity. Without it she cannot hold herself together. Internal HR has seen this before. That she works at three times the rate of other people is not a private matter: the people around her are the ones who pay. She is a pressure device. We decided to destroy the identity with her.

Withdrawal, And What FollowedThe company machine, the personal machine, and the telephone were detonated remotely this morning. She sat stunned as the devices in front of her caught fire and blew apart. When she understood that Internal HR had done it, she borrowed her husband’s phone and called us in a torrent.

We have hired many people on the condition that they work as little as possible. Most of them wept with joy. She was the opposite: a startup person, hired by mistake. The mistake is ours. Having hired her, we are obliged to see the rehabilitation through until she is ordinary again.

She has been told not to buy replacements for three months. Her husband reports that after eighteen hundred she thrashes with the need to work, and that he has been tying her to the bed. Lately the symptoms have eased. The coffee in the next room only rattles a little.

For the record: the ghost in Slack would have been better as a bot. It was a person. A person who starts running, it seems, is an animal that cannot stop.

Filed for the record

Questions about the detonations may be sent to Floor 4. We expect none.

This is the third issue. It is numbered two. The numbering is now a sequence, and will remain one until it is not.