Back From Holiday, Straight Into Fiction

Back From Holiday, Straight Into Fiction is one of those thoughts that starts as a joke and stays because reality keeps volunteering evidence.

Some complaints are petty. Some are diagnostic. The trick is learning which is which before you waste an entire week pretending that irritation has no informational value. Often it does. Annoyance can be a useful early-warning system for design flaws that have not yet produced a formal incident report.

I also think humour is underrated in serious work. Not because problems are funny, but because absurdity is often the most accurate description available. There are moments when the only intellectually honest response to a process, a meeting or a weather pattern is to laugh first and analyse second.

The problem begins when nobody is allowed to say what everybody can already see. Then a mild irritation turns into a culture issue. People start speaking in codes, surviving through irony and treating obvious nonsense as if it were an immutable law of physics.

A good rant therefore does not only release steam. It restores language. It lets ordinary people say: no, this is not normal, this is not necessary and this would in fact be much better if somebody stopped pretending otherwise.