Ellis knew she needed a walk after she hurried off of Zoom at the end of the meeting to avoid sobbing in front of the group.

She'd just been attending a free online seminar regarding safe job hunting on the Internet. Having been searching since the end of January, Ellis had already picked up plenty of first-hand experience with the modern job market, one rejection at a time. She thought she'd attend the seminar just to see if there were any additional things she wasn't aware of. The seminar had gone well, good information presented in a clear and engaging way. But by the end of it, Ellis was feeling bleak. Goodness gracious, she'd already been slogging through months of this. Hundreds of job applications with nothing to show for it. All of the scams out there, all of the bad actors preying on people desperate for their and their loved ones' survival!

Ellis' childhood had been plagued with anxiety and depression. It was only as an adult that she'd learned any tricks for coping with them. These tricks had helped her avoid spiraling into full-on depression for the past several years. One such trick was to stop and notice whenever those first feelings hit. Recognize them, feel them, and then respond constructively.

First, a walk. Going out where there were trees and sunshine: Ellis considered this "garbage collection" for her brain. So she stepped out the front door and started down a tree-lined path near her house, holding on to that bleak feeling. She was well aware that if she didn't address it, it would take root and grow into hopelessness, self-loathing, fear of the future. It would paralyze her, leave her curled up on the couch doing nothing. And it would all happen without any words issuing from her inner voice. That was the most insidious thing. It happened way down deep in a place where there were no words at all.

Once she returned home, Ellis forced herself to sit down with a notebook and pencil and think very hard about what was bothering her. She wrote down each sentiment:

This was the first step of a reframing technique she'd just read about in the book Right Kind of Wrong by Amy Edmonson. With the words out, it was possible to look at each statement and determine whether it was rational or irrational, constructive or harmful. Each statement could be replaced with something better.

Ellis proceeded step by step through the list.

• Yes, this will end. Everything ends.
• There's nothing wrong with me. Most businesses are swamped with applications. There's a good chance mine aren't even being looked at before they're being auto-rejected. Remember the growth mindset you learned from Carol Dweck. Each application and interview is giving me experience and making me a better candidate.
• This job market is a novel context that changes every day. That means failure is not only inevitable, it's the only way forward.

Ellis realized that her job hunt was very much like a search algorithm trying to find a path through a maze. When the algorithm encountered a dead end, did it deserve blame? Was it an occasion for shame, embarrassment, and despair? Of course not. Simply backtrack and keep going with the knowledge gained.

Yes, there was truth to the fact that this was the toughest job market Ellis had ever experienced. Therefore, taking a note from Viktor Frankl, she spent a moment reimagining the struggle in a way that made it meaningful to her. Ellis began viewing her job hunt in this dangerous market, her gradual accumulation of survival information, as an act of resistance against it. She now hoped to write all about her experience once she was on the other side, in case her advice might help even one other person in her situation save time and frustration.

While unemployed, she also had the opportunity to employ the search algorithm against entirely new mazes. Could Ellis expand her freelance writing into a sustainable gig, for instance? That would mean exploring all the different ways to be a freelance writer, something Ellis was now curious and excited to explore.

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Everyone's got workplace woes. The clueless manager; the disruptive coworker; the cube walls that loom ever higher as the years pass, trapping whatever's left of your soul.

But sometimes, Satan really leaves his mark on a joint. I worked Tech Support there. This is my story. Who am I? Just call me Anonymous.

It starts at the top. A call came in from Lawrence Gibbs, the CEO himself, telling us that a conference room printer was, quote, "leaking." He didn't explain it, he just hung up. The boss ordered me out immediately, told me to step on it. I ignored the elevator, racing up the staircase floor after floor until I reached the dizzying summit of C-Town.

There's less oxygen up there, I'm sure of it. My lungs ached and my head spun as I struggled to catch my breath. The fancy tile and high ceilings made a workaday schmuck like me feel daunted, unwelcome. All the same, I gathered myself and pushed on, if only to learn what on earth "leaking" meant in relation to a printer.

I followed the signs on the wall to the specified conference room. In there, the thermostat had been kicked down into the negatives. The cold cut through every layer of mandated business attire, straight to bone. The scene was thick with milling bystanders who hugged themselves and traded the occasional nervous glance. Gibbs was nowhere to be found.

Remembering my duty, I summoned my nerve. "Tech Support. Where's the printer?" I asked.

Several pointing fingers showed me the way. The large printer/scanner was situated against the far wall, flanking an even more enormous conference table. Upon rounding the table, I was greeted with a grim sight: dozens of sheets of paper strewn about the floor like blood spatter. Everyone was keeping their distance; no one paid me any mind as I knelt to gather the pages. There were 30 in all. Each one was blank on one side, and sported some kind of large, blotchy ring on the other. Lord knew I drank enough java to recognize a coffee mug stain when I saw one, but these weren't actual stains. They were printouts of stains.

The printer was plugged in. No sign of foul play. As I knelt there, unseen and unheeded, I clutched the ruined papers to my chest. Someone had wasted a tree and a good bit of toner, and for what? How'd it go down? Surely Gibbs knew more than he'd let on. The thought of seeking him out, demanding answers, set my heart to pounding. It was no good, I knew. He'd play coy all day and hand me my pink slip if I pushed too hard. As much as I wanted the truth, I had a stack of unpaid bills at home almost as thick as the one in my arms. I had to come up with something else.

There had to be witnesses among the bystanders. I stood up and glanced among them, seeking out any who would return eye contact. There: a woman who looked every bit as polished as everyone else. But for once, I got the feeling that what lay beneath the facade wasn't rotten.

With my eyes, I pleaded for answers.

Not here, her gaze pleaded back.

I was getting somewhere, I just had to arrange for some privacy. I hurried around the table again and weaved through bystanders toward the exit, hoping to beat it out of that icebox unnoticed. When I reached the threshold, I spotted Gibbs charging up the corridor, smoldering with entitlement. "Where the hell is Tech Support?!"

I froze a good distance away from the oncoming executive, whose voice I recognized from a thousand corporate presentations. Instead of putting me to sleep this time, it jolted down my spine like lightning. I had to think fast, or I was gonna lose my lead, if not my life.

"I'm right here, sir!" I said. "Be right back! I, uh, just need to find a folder for these papers."

"I've got one in my office."

A woman's voice issued calmly only a few feet behind me. I spun around, and it was her, all right, her demeanor as cool as our surroundings. She nodded my way. "Follow me."

My spirits soared. At that moment, I would've followed her into hell. Turning around, I had the pleasure of seeing Gibbs stop short with a glare of contempt. Then he waved us out of his sight.

Once we were out in the corridor, she took the lead, guiding me through the halls as I marveled at my luck. Eventually, she used her key card on one of the massive oak doors, and in we went.

You could've fit my entire apartment into that office. The place was spotless. Mini-fridge, espresso machine, even couches: none of it looked used. There were a couple of cardboard boxes piled up near her desk, which sat in front of a massive floor-to-ceiling window admitting ample sunlight.

She motioned toward one of the couches, inviting me to sit. I shook my head in reply. I was dying for a cigarette by that point, but I didn't dare light up within this sanctuary. Not sure what to expect next, I played it cautious, hovering close to the exit. "Thanks for the help back there, ma'am."

"Don't mention it." She walked back to her desk, opened up a drawer, and pulled out a brand-new manila folder. Then she returned to conversational distance and proffered it my way. "You're from Tech Support?"

There was pure curiosity in her voice, no disparagement, which was encouraging. I accepted the folder and stuffed the ruined pages inside. "That's right, ma'am."

She shook her head. "Please call me Leila. I started a few weeks ago. I'm the new head of HR."

Human Resources. That acronym, which usually put me on edge, somehow failed to raise my hackles. I'd have to keep vigilant, of course, but so far she seemed surprisingly OK. "Welcome aboard, Leila. I wish we were meeting in better circumstances." Duty beckoned. I hefted the folder. "Printers don't just leak."

"No." Leila glanced askance, grave.

"Tell me what you saw."

"Well ..." She shrugged helplessly. "Whenever Mr. Gibbs gets excited during a meeting, he tends to lean against the printer and rest his coffee mug on top of it. Today, he must've hit the Scan button with his elbow. I saw the scanner go off. It was so bright ..." She trailed off with a pained glance downward.

"I know this is hard," I told her when the silence stretched too long. "Please, continue."

Leila summoned her mettle. "After he leaned on the controls, those pages spilled out of the printer. And then ... then somehow, I have no idea, I swear! Somehow, all those pages were also emailed to me, Mr. Gibbs' assistant, and the entire board of directors!"

The shock hit me first. My eyes went wide and my jaw fell. But then I reminded myself, I'd seen just as crazy and worse as the result of a cat jumping on a keyboard. A feline doesn't know any better. A top-level executive, on the other hand, should know better.

"Sounds to me like the printer's just fine," I spoke with conviction. "What we have here is a CEO who thinks it's OK to treat an expensive piece of office equipment like his own personal fainting couch."

"It's terrible!" Leila's gaze burned with purpose. "I promise, I'll do everything I possibly can to make sure something like this never happens again!"

I smiled a gallows smile. "Not sure what anyone can do to fix this joint, but the offer's appreciated. Thanks again for your help."

Now that I'd seen this glimpse of better things, I selfishly wanted to linger. But it was high time I got outta there. I didn't wanna make her late for some meeting or waste her time. I backed up toward the door on feet that were reluctant to move.

Leila watched me with a look of concern. "Mr. Gibbs was the one who called Tech Support. I can't close your ticket for you; you'll have to get him to do it. What are you going to do?"

She cared. That made leaving even harder. "I dunno yet. I'll think of something."

I turned around, opened the massive door, and put myself on the other side of it in a hurry, using wall signs to backtrack to the conference room. Would our paths ever cross again? Unlikely. Someone like her was sure to get fired, or quit out of frustration, or get corrupted over time.

It was too painful to think about, so I forced myself to focus on the folder of wasted pages in my arms instead. It felt like a mile-long rap sheet. I was dealing with an alleged leader who went so far as to blame the material world around him rather than accept personal responsibility. I'd have to appeal to one or more of the things he actually cared about: himself, his bottom line, his sense of power.

By the time I returned to the conference room to face the CEO, I knew what to tell him. "You're right, sir, there's something very wrong with this printer. We're gonna take it out here and give it a thorough work-up."

That was how I was able to get the printer out of that conference room for good. Once it underwent "inspection" and "testing," it received a new home in a previously unused closet. Whenever Gibbs got to jawing in future meetings, all he could do was lean against the wall. Ticket closed.

Gibbs remained at the top, doing accursed things that trickled down to the roots of his accursed company. But at least from then on, every onboarding slideshow included a photo of one of the coffee ring printouts, with the title Respect the Equipment.

Thanks, Leila. I can live with that.

Once upon a time, there was a bank whose business relied on a mainframe. As the decades passed and the 21st century dawned, the bank's bigwigs realized they had to upgrade their frontline systems to applications built in Java and .NET, but—for myriad reasons that boiled down to cost, fear, and stubbornness—they didn't want to migrate away from the mainframe entirely. They also didn't want the new frontline systems to talk directly to the mainframe or vice-versa. So they tasked old-timer Edgar with writing some middleware. Edgar's brainchild was a Windows service that took care of receiving frontline requests, passing them to the mainframe, and sending the responses back.

Edgar's middleware worked well, so well that it was largely forgotten about. It outlasted Edgar himself, who, after another solid decade of service, moved on to another company.

A few years later, our submitter John F. joined the bank's C# team. By this point, the poor middleware seemed to be showing its age. A strange problem had arisen: between 8:00AM and 5:00PM, every 45 minutes or so, it would lock up and have to be restarted. Outside of those hours, there was no issue. The problem was mitigated by automatic restarts, but it continued to inflict pain and aggravation upon internal users and external customers. A true solution had to be found.

Unfortunately, Edgar was long gone. The new "owner" of the middleware was an infrastructure team containing zero developers. Had Edgar left them any documentation? No. Source code? Sort of. Edgar had given a copy of the code to his friend Bob prior to leaving. Unfortunately, Bob's copy was a few point releases behind the version of middleware running in production. It was also in C, and there were no C developers to be found anywhere in the company.

And so, the bank's bigwigs cobbled together a diverse team of experts. There were operating system people, network people, and software people ... including the new guy, John. Poor John had the unenviable task of sifting through Edgar's source code. Just as the C# key sits right next to the C key on a piano, reasoned the bigwigs, C# couldn't be that different from C.

John toiled in an unfamiliar language with no build server or test environment to aid him. It should be no great surprise that he got nowhere. A senior coworker suggested that he check what Windows' Process Monitor registered when the middleware was running. John allowed a full day to pass, then looked at the results: it was now clear that the middleware was constantly creating and destroying threads. John wrote a Python script to analyze the threads, and found that most of them lived for only seconds. However, every 5 minutes, a thread was created but never destroyed.

This only happened during the hours of 8:00AM to 5:00PM.

At the next cross-functional team meeting behind closed doors, John finally had something of substance to report to the large group seated around the conference room table. There was still a huge mystery to solve: where were these middleware-killing threads coming from?

"Wait a minute! Wasn't Frank doing something like that?" one of the other team members piped up.

"Frank!" A department manager with no technical expertise, who insisted on attending every meeting regardless, darted up straight in his chair. For once, he wasn't haranguing them for their lack of progress. He resembled a wolf who'd sniffed blood in the air. "You mean Frank from Accounting?!"

This was the corporate equivalent of an arrest warrant. Frank from Accounting was duly called forth.

"That's my program." Frank stood before the table, laid back and blithe despite the obvious frayed nerves of several individuals within the room. "It queries the middleware every 5 minutes."

They were finally getting somewhere. Galvanized, John's heart pounded. "How?" he asked.

"Well, it could be that the middleware is down, so first, my program opens a connection just to make sure it's working," Frank explained. "If that works, it opens another connection and sends the query."

John's confusion mirrored the multiple frowns that filled the room. He forced himself to carefully parse what he'd just heard. "What happens to the first connection?"

"What do you mean?" Frank asked.

"You said your program opens two connections. What do you do with the first one?"

"Oh! I just use that one to test whether the middleware is up."

"You don't need to do that!" one of the networking experts snarled. "For Pete's sake, take that out of your code! Don't you realize you're tanking this thing for everyone else?"

Frank's expression made clear that he was entirely oblivious to the chaos wrought by his program. Somehow, he survived the collective venting of frustration that followed within that conference room. After one small update to Frank's program, the middleware stabilized—for the time being. And while Frank became a scapegoat and villain to some, he was a hero to many, many more. After all, he single-handedly convinced the bank's bigwigs that the status quo was too precarious. They began to plan out a full migration away from mainframe, a move that would free them from their dependence upon aging, orphaned middleware.

Now that the mystery had been solved, John knew where to look in Edgar's source code. The thread pool had a limit of 10, and every thread began by waiting for input. The middleware could handle bad input well enough, but it hadn't been written to handle the case of no input at all.

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Our anonymous submitter, whom we'll call Craig, worked for GlobalCon. GlobalCon relied on an offshore team on the other side of the world for adding/removing users from the system, support calls, ticket tracking, and other client services. One day at work, an urgent escalated ticket from Martin, the offshore support team lead, fell into Craig's queue. Seated before his cubicle workstation, Craig opened the ticket right away:

The new GlobalCon support website is not working. Appears to have been taken over by ChatGPT. The entire support team is blocked by this.

Instead of feeling any sense of urgency, Craig snorted out loud from perverse amusement.

"What was that now?" The voice of Nellie, his coworker, wafted over the cubicle wall that separated them.

"Urgent ticket from the offshore team," Craig replied.

"What is it this time?" Nellie couldn't suppress her glee.

"They're dead in the water because the new support page was, quote, taken over by ChatGPT."

Nellie laughed out loud.

"Hey! I know humor is important to surviving this job." A level, more mature voice piped up behind Craig from the cube across from his. It belonged to Dana, his manager. "But it really is urgent if they're all blocked. Do your best to help, escalate to me if you get stuck."

"OK, thanks. I got this," Craig assured her.

He was already 99.999% certain that no part of their web domain had gone down or been conquered by a belligerent AI, or else he would've heard of it by now. To make sure, Craig opened support.globalcon.com in a browser tab: sure enough, it worked. Martin had supplied no further detail, no logs or screenshots or videos, and no steps to reproduce, which was sadly typical of most of these escalations. At a loss, Craig took a screenshot of the webpage, opened the ticket, and posted the following: Everything's fine on this end. If it's still not working for you, let's do a screenshare.

Granted, a screensharing session was less than ideal given the 12-hour time difference. Craig hoped that whatever nefarious shenanigans ChatGPT had allegedly committed were resolved by now.

The next day, Craig received an update. Still not working. The entire team is still blocked. We're too busy to do a screenshare, please resolve ASAP.

Craig checked the website again with both laptop and phone. He had other people visit the website for him, trying different operating systems and web browsers. Every combination worked. Two things mystified him: how was the entire offshore team having this issue, and how were they "too busy" for anything if they were all dead in the water? At a loss, Craig attached an updated screenshot to the ticket and typed out the best CYA response he could muster. The new support website is up and has never experienced any issues. With no further proof or steps to reproduce this, I don't know what to tell you. I think a screensharing session would be the best thing at this point.

The next day, Martin parroted his last message almost word for word, except this time he assented to a screensharing session, suggesting the next morning for himself.

It was deep into the evening when Craig set up his work laptop on his kitchen counter and started a call and session for Martin to join. "OK. Can you show me what you guys are trying to do?"

To his surprise, he watched Martin open up Microsoft Teams first thing. From there, Martin accessed a chat to the entire offshore support team from the CPO of GlobalCon. The message proudly introduced the new support website and outlined the steps for accessing it. One of those steps was to visit support.globalcon.com.

The web address was rendered as blue outlined text, a hyperlink. Craig observed Martin clicking the link. A web browser opened up. Lo and behold, the page that finally appeared was www.chatgpt.com.

Craig blinked with surprise. "Hang on! I'm gonna take over for a second."

Upon taking control of the session, Craig switched back to Teams and accessed the link's details. The link text was correct, but the link destination was ChatGPT. It seemed like a copy/paste error that the CPO had tried to fix, not realizing that they'd needed to do more than simply update the link text.

"This looks like a bad link," Craig said. "It got sent to your entire team. And all of you have been trying to access the support site with this link?"

"Correct," Martin replied.

Craig was glad he couldn't be seen frowning and shaking his head. "Lemme show you what I've been doing. Then you can show everyone else, OK?"

After surrendering control of the session, Craig patiently walked Martin through the steps of opening a web browser, typing support.globalcon.com into the header, and hitting Return. The site opened without any issue. From there, Craig taught Martin how to create a bookmark for it.

"Just click on that from now on, and it'll always take you to the right place," Craig said. "In the future, before you click on any hyperlink, make sure you hover your mouse over it to see where it actually goes. Links can be labeled one thing when they actually take you somewhere else. That's how phishing works."

"Oh," Martin said. "Thanks!"

The call ended on a positive note, but left Craig marveling at the irony of lecturing the tech support lead on Internet 101 in the dead of night.