Clicking the ‘Next’ button has become a form of liturgical prayer, a repetitive motion that promises salvation but only delivers another slide on the 16th amendment of the company’s data retention policy. I am sitting in a chair that supposedly costs $676, yet my lower back is screaming because the ergonomic adjustment guide is buried somewhere in the 46th folder of the digital welcome kit. The blue light from the monitor is beginning to feel like a physical weight, pressing against my retinas while a synth-pop song from the late eighties-I think it’s ‘Head Like a Hole’ by Nine Inch Nails, though my brain is translating it into a elevator-music version-loops endlessly in the back of my skull. Bow down before the one you serve, indeed. It’s been exactly 96 days since I signed the offer letter, and I am currently a professional ghost. I haunt the Zoom meetings. I rattle the chains of my Slack notifications. But if you asked me what I am actually supposed to achieve by the end of this fiscal year, I would tell you that I am very good at completing modules about phishing scams.

The Vertigo of Bureaucracy

There is a specific kind of vertigo that comes with being three months into a role and realizing that your entire existence is a series of bureaucratic checkmarks. We pretend that onboarding is about integration, but it’s actually about insulation. The organization isn’t trying to bring you in; it’s trying to make sure that if you explode, the debris doesn’t hit any of the senior leadership. I’ve watched 16 videos on how to report a fire, but I haven’t had a single conversation with my direct manager about what ‘success’ looks like in the context of our 206-page strategic plan. It’s a vacuum of purpose filled with the Styrofoam peanuts of compliance training. We are wasting the most energetic phase of a new hire-the period where they actually want to contribute-by burying them under a mountain of administrative sludge that has nothing to do with the work. It’s a collective hallucination where we believe that ‘access to the shared drive’ is the same thing as ‘knowing how to do the job.’

I think about Sarah N. sometimes. She’s a prison librarian I met during a brief stint volunteering for a literacy program. Sarah N. doesn’t have the luxury of a 96-day grace period where she wanders around wondering where the bathroom is or how to file a ticket for a broken keyboard. In the prison library, clarity is a survival mechanism. If Sarah N. doesn’t know the exact protocol for checking out a legal text versus a battered copy of a James Patterson novel, the resulting friction can escalate into a security incident in less than 6 minutes. She told me once that her ‘onboarding’ was a trial by fire where she had to learn the names, the hierarchies, and the invisible lines of the room before the first gate clicked shut behind her. She didn’t have 46 hours of e-learning. She had a mentor who stood 6 inches away from her and told her exactly who to trust and exactly which shelf was prone to being used as a dead-drop for contraband. There is something honest about that. It’s high-stakes, it’s visceral, and it recognizes that a human being in a new environment needs a map, not a manual.

In the corporate world, we provide the manual but hide the map. We give the new hire a $126 keyboard and a login to a portal that contains 236 documents, most of which haven’t been updated since 2016. We tell them to ‘soak it all in’ and ‘take their time,’ which is code for ‘we are too busy to actually tell you what to do, so please stay quiet until we remember you exist.’ This is where the attrition starts. It’s not the work that kills the spirit; it’s the absence of work. It’s the feeling of being a Ferrari idling in a school zone. You want to go 106 miles per hour, but you’re stuck behind a crossing guard who is actually just an HR automated email reminding you to sign the code of conduct for the 6th time. We are essentially paying people to lose their momentum.

I’ve spent the last 36 hours wondering if I’ve made a terrible mistake. It’s not that I hate the company; it’s that I can’t find the company. It’s a phantom limb. I feel the itch of responsibility, but when I reach for it, there’s nothing there. I tried to talk to a colleague yesterday-let’s call him Dave, or maybe it was Dan, I’ve forgotten because I’ve only seen his name in a 6-pixel-square avatar on a screen-and he just told me to ‘check the Wiki.’ The Wiki is a graveyard. It’s where information goes to die and be forgotten by everyone except the search bot. It has 466 entries on how to book a conference room, but zero entries on how to handle a client who is threatening to pull a $136,000 contract because we missed a deadline I didn’t even know existed. I’m criticising the jargon now, I know, I hate it, but here I am, using terms like ‘stakeholder alignment’ because after 96 days, the language of the machine starts to grow on you like lichen on a tombstone.

The Absurdity of Waiting

I have this recurring dream lately where I am in a room with 156 other new hires, all of us sitting at $676 desks, all of us watching a video of a person telling us how excited they are that we’ve joined the team. In the dream, we all start singing that Nine Inch Nails song in unison, our voices flat and mechanical. ‘Head like a hole, black as your soul, I’d rather die than give you control.’ It’s a bit dramatic, I suppose. But that’s what happens when you leave a human being alone with their thoughts and a broken onboarding process for 96 days. You don’t get a loyal employee; you get a philosopher of the absurd. You get someone who starts to see the cracks in the drywall and the emptiness in the mission statement. You get someone who, eventually, will just stop showing up, even if they’re still sitting in the chair.

We need to stop treating the start of a job like a long-form dental appointment. It shouldn’t be something you ‘get through.’ It should be the moment the engines roar to life. But for now, I’ll just go back to my 16th module. I’ll click ‘Next.’ I’ll watch the progress bar crawl across the screen like a tired insect. I’ll wait for the clock to hit 4:56 PM so I can justify closing my laptop and pretending that I exist in the real world for a few hours. Somewhere, Sarah N. is probably putting a book back on a shelf with a sharp, satisfying click of certainty. I envy her. I envy the clarity of a place where the walls are made of stone instead of 46 different shades of ‘collaborative’ grey. I’m still here, 96 days in, waiting for someone to tell me what I’m doing. If you find me, please, just give me a map. Or a bucket. Anything but another video.