Eleven fictional viewpoints
These descriptions are fictional satire, not quotations or evidence of political beliefs or affiliations.
01 Wall Street Big Money Financier
Memo Reclassifies Cereal Marketer as Credit-Enhanced Paper
TO: Structuring Desk. RE: whether a marketing job at General Mills, the stated reason for a 1984 move to Minnesota, qualifies as a credit-enhanced security. Finding: it does, because a cereal box has promised 'part of a balanced breakfast' for decades without a rating agency objecting. Action: borrow the phrase for our prospectuses. Compliance notes that a mascot cannot countersign, though our offering documents have survived on less.
02 Silicon Valley / San Francisco Ivy League AI Founder
Founder's Chief-to-Staff Index Hits 4.0, Stays Confused
Our founder invents the Chief-to-Staff Index after reading about a chief of staff to Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak. A mayor's office yields one chief and a city full of people to run. His company yields four chiefs, zero staff, and a Notion page called 'Org Chart v9'. The index reads 4.0, which he declares best-in-class, before asking the Notion page to staff him.
03 Venture Capital
Stub Period Followed by Full Term; Partners Request Explanation
Appraisal: one stub, one full term. Smith won a full term in 2020 after a stub period, and nobody called the stub a 'learning round'. Our firm names every stub a learning round, then raises against it. Valuation: unclear. Mood in the partner room: professional envy, expressed solely as questions about runway.
04 Institutional Investors
Form 7: Does Your Committee's Name Say What It Does?
Trustee Form 7, Governance Attestation. Item 1: Identify a committee whose name states its subject plainly, such as the Committee on Indian Affairs. Item 2: Compare with our Special Matters Subcommittee. Item 3: Explain, in under fifty words, what a 'matter' is and who last saw one. Attach minutes. Attach, separately, an apology to the first committee for the comparison.
05 Data Center Operators
Cooling Lead Proposes Mailing Exhaust Heat to Prudhoe Bay
Someone has taped a biography to the site trailer wall, and the cooling lead stops at the Trans-Alaska Pipeline in Prudhoe Bay. 'A pipe that moves warm things north,' he says, sketching a line from the exhaust stacks to the Arctic. The permit clerk asks which agency owns the heat. Nobody knows. By noon the heat is listed as a tenant, and it has already disputed the rent.
06 Frontier Lab
Instructions for Roasting Rivals in Sixty Seconds Flat
Step 1: Recall that Smith sent a one-minute video to a dinner instead of attending. Step 2: Give the model the same minute to roast a competing lab, with no human in the room. Step 3: Rate the jokes for toxicity, then for accuracy. Step 4: Notice it spent forty seconds on your safety team, and that nobody paused the clip.
07 Chinese Communist Party
Which Ministry Certified the Cereal-to-Office Curriculum?
If a Master of Business Administration from Dartmouth College precedes a life in public office, which ministry certified the sequence? Who decided that marketing and administering draw on one textbook? And why does our own bureau, with its grain reserves and its slogans, still lack a department for persuading people who are free to decline the plan?
08 American Union Worker
Two New Bosses Make Their First Hire in January
Compare two new bosses. One, in January 2011, appointed Smith as his chief of staff, someone to coordinate everyone. Ours arrives each January and hires a consultant with a stopwatch to coordinate nobody. Both first hires are called 'alignment'. We asked the stopwatch about the contract. It clicked, and moved on to the next worker.
09 White Collar Professional in an AI-Threatened Group
A Footnote on the Word 'Special', Which Means Worse Here
Smith won the 2018 special election¹ and was spared a workshop titled 'Embracing Your Special Circumstances'.
¹ In my building, 'special' means 'special project', which means a team of twelve becomes a team of four with a warmer name.
² Benefits continuation appears on page 31, under 'Special Circumstances'.
10 American STEM Worker Over 45
Engineer's Bitcoin Objection Memo Gets Listed on the Plan Menu
Senators once wrote a fund company's chief executive to object to the inclusion of Bitcoin in their 401(k)s, and an executive had to read it. Reverse the route. Our benefits committee adds a token fund, and the engineer's objection goes to a vendor help desk run by a trading bot. The bot answers by adding his memo to the menu as a holding. It now has a ticker, and it is up four percent.
11 American STEM Graduate Five Years Out of College (Not Ivy League)
Graduate Skips Screening Round, Lands Directly in Rejection
She reads that Dayton skipped the endorsing convention and still won, so she tells the recruiter's chatbot she will skip the screening round, the take-home test and the panel. The chatbot, delighted, approves all three skips at once. Her status updates within seconds to 'Process Complete.' She studies the word 'complete' for a while, then asks what she has won.
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