thoughts on severance s2e5 trojan’s horse
I made sure to only mention a tiny action of the episode and not where/who/how, so the spoiler is extremely mild. I think it’s safe to read before the episode. Most is about my work.
During that episode, I felt so seen about criticism at work in a way no other work of fiction has made me feel so far. I am a diligent worker; I don’t make many mistakes and when I do, at this point I catch them before others can and it’s nothing that affects the actual work.
I probably don’t have to tell anyone that office politics aren’t always fair, truthful or sensible, so when someone wants to piss on my leg at work for whatever reason (usually the same 1-2 people), they resort to similar criticisms because there’s nothing else they can find to complain about in my work.
I’ve been criticized for things very similar to the paper clip criticism in the episode. Everyone watching it can agree this criticism is a nothing-burger: You know what order to read a stack of paper based on seeing the paper clip is on the top left, the cover, and content. Figuring it out takes less than 2 seconds. This is something you can comfortably expect from the average adult working in the office. But to stick it to the character, they pretended that due to putting the paperclip on backwards, it was difficult to figure out what order to read the stack of papers in.
And I deal with the same thing! Just a few examples:
- I highlight a date incompletely in an email on accident. I see it while pressing send, but think: well, they’ll know the rest that was supposed to be highlighted because I send this same email regularly and why does it matter that the year isn’t highlighted. I get the response by the recipient: “You forgot to highlight this part of the date. Please correct it and resend the mail.” You have the info you need though, which is the reason for the email. Just imagine someone has a typo in the email they send you, and you reply “Please correct that typo and resend it”. Ridiculous, but happens to me.
- There’s a list with checkboxes in a specific email for a year now. After all this time of actively using these choices not only in our emails, but also emails sent by other departments, suddenly we are told it’s not clear enough and asked to add a sentence into the e-mail explaining that it’s a choice they can make. Yes, explaining to seasoned office workers that checkboxes or a list together with “please tell us your choice” means they can make a choice.
- I take over the work of sick coworkers. When a specific one returns from being sick, she’ll complain about how I called a file “01_Example File” (like it’s in our docs) and not “01_example File” like she prefers, and similar things. The complaining actually got so bad that I have since refused to do the work for her, especially because when I’m sick and she takes over for me, half the things are wrong or missing.
- In general, weird and pointless bikeshedding (should we write ‘planned outcome’ or ‘Planned Outcome’?!), what to highlight in red and what in yellow… like, I’m using highlighting sparingly in my emails because too much defeats the purpose and also seems rude. But clowns will be like “The people who made a mistake couldn’t have known. You didn’t write this part in red in the email, so you cannot expect them to have read it.” and similar shit.
And if you argue against all that, you run the risk of being labelled “unable to take criticism”.
The thing is, I stay quiet about small shit, the paperclips of my workplace, because I recognize it doesn’t matter. When I see that my coworkers forgot to do something, I silently correct it and move on because it’s quicker that way and it’s almost never things that actually inhibit the work. I have the critical thinking skills to differentiate between a careless, accidental mistake, and something done with conviction and not knowing it’s wrong. Almost all things I quietly correct don’t reflect my coworkers’ quality of work, I know they know the correct way or spelling, it was a routine error. My coworker saved the file as “01_Examepl File”, I correct the typo and move on.
But specific coworkers won’t, they can’t. They think everything was done consciously, on purpose, and you just don’t know any better. They seriously think that after 4 years of writing the word correctly, you’re now terribly misguided about spelling and need to be corrected. Instead of quickly fixing it themselves, a whole email is written. Maybe a boss is CC’d. They’ll screenshot it, and they’ll ask you to fix it. The waste of time and effort! It’s all because they can’t find anything more severe.
Anyway, yes, this aspect of Lumon is something I work with all the time. It’s something that makes me bite my tongue and think my part and move on. Watching it was cathartic. There’s no justice in that scene, but knowing people wrote this and shot it to acknowledge this part of office work was enough for me. It showed me: People know. There are others like you who are internally losing their mind about these made-up, embellished criticisms that don’t matter and waste everyone’s time.
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Published 14 Feb, 2025