Your screen pings with a notification from a system you never asked for, informing you that ticket #8675309 has been ‘escalated’ to Level 2 Support. This is the 9th time you’ve seen this automated greeting in 29 days. You are currently sitting 19 feet away from the IT department’s glass-walled office, yet the only way to get a printer driver installed is to pray to a software ghost in a server farm three states away. The printer, a hulking grey beast that smells of ozone and 49-cent toner, remains as silent as the grave. You have filled out the requisition forms. You have provided the cost center code. You have even offered a sacrificial doughnut. But the system is built to process transactions, not to help people. This is the ultimate irony of the ‘internal customer’ model: by treating your coworkers like clients, you’ve actually stopped treating them like colleagues.

We were told that the internal customer model would revolutionize the workplace by bringing the ‘efficiency of the market’ inside the company. If the HR department treated the Marketing department like a paying customer, the theory went, service levels would skyrocket. Competition and accountability would replace the sluggishness of old-school hierarchy. Instead, we’ve created a landscape of bureaucratic fiefdoms where everyone has an SLA (Service Level Agreement) to hide behind. If the SLA says I have 49 hours to respond to your email, I’m not going to answer it in 9 minutes, even if the building is on fire and you’re the one with the extinguisher.

The Heart Monitor and the KPI

Anna F., a medical equipment courier I know who has spent the last 39 years navigating the labyrinthine corridors of regional healthcare, sees this friction every day. She’s 59 now, with a grip like a vise and a memory for floor plans that would shame a GPS. Last Tuesday, she was trying to deliver a heart monitor-a critical piece of kit worth roughly $19,999-to the neonatal unit.

But because of a ‘system update’ in the logistics portal, her security badge wouldn’t let her through the 9th-floor service elevator. The security team, acting as an ‘internal service provider,’ told her she needed to open a ticket. Anna stood there, heart monitor in hand, staring at a man behind a desk who refused to look up from his screen because his KPIs were tied to ticket resolution times, not to how fast a baby gets a monitor. This is what happens when we atomize a company into a collection of transactional vendors. We lose the shared pulse of the mission.

“

[the system eats the soul it was meant to save]

Archived Feedback and Digital Handshakes

I’ve made mistakes before, of course. I once accidentally sent a 49-page manifesto about the inefficiency of the company car park to the entire board of directors instead of my supervisor. I forgot to check the ‘To’ field. It was a classic slip, the kind of human error that happens when you’re overworked and under-caffeinated. But the response I got wasn’t a phone call or a reprimand. It was an automated notification that my ‘feedback ticket’ had been categorized as ‘Facilities-Non-Urgent’ and archived. No one read it. No one cared. They just processed the data point. We are obsessed with the data of work rather than the work itself. We’ve replaced the messy, beautiful reality of human collaboration with a series of digital handshakes that feel increasingly like cold, dead fish.

This reminds me of the way some consumer services try to wrap themselves in the language of ‘experience’ while delivering nothing but friction. It’s the same frustration people feel when they’re trying to coordinate life’s big moments, like a baby shower, only to find that every registry tool forces them into a siloed corner. That’s why platforms like

LMK.today exist-to pull the scattered pieces into one coherent, human-centric experience instead of a series of disjointed transactions.

I’ve spent 109 hours this year just waiting for ‘approvals’ that are nothing more than a manager clicking a box because a system told them to. This is the hidden tax of the modern enterprise. We pay it in time, in morale, and in the slow erosion of our creative will. Anna F. eventually got that heart monitor to the 9th floor, but she didn’t do it through the portal. She did it by finding a janitor she’s known for 19 years who still believes in helping people instead of following a workflow. He used his master key, skipped the ‘customer service’ desk, and just did the right thing. It was an act of subversion. It’s pathetic that in 2024, doing your job efficiently often requires an act of rebellion against the very systems designed to manage that job.

The Toll of Administrative Labor

Let’s talk about the paperwork. Why are there 9 different forms for a travel request? Why does the finance department require a PDF of a receipt that was already generated by the corporate booking tool? It’s because the finance department isn’t working with you; they are ‘auditing’ you as a customer of their budget. They have their own goals-usually involving 99% compliance rates-that have absolutely nothing to do with whether or not you actually close the deal in Chicago. We’ve created a system where every department is an island, and the only way to travel between them is by paying a toll in the form of administrative labor. I’ve often found myself wondering if we could just delete 49% of our internal software and see if anyone notices. My guess? Productivity would go up because we’d actually have to talk to each other again.

I know I’m being harsh. I realize that in a company of 19,000 people, you need some structure. But there’s a difference between structure and a straightjacket. The internal customer model has become a straightjacket. It’s a way for departments to say ‘no’ more efficiently. ‘That’s not in our SLA.’ ‘You haven’t filled out Form 409-B.’ ‘The ticket queue is currently at 19 days.’ These aren’t answers; they are defensive maneuvers. They are the sounds of a company dying from the inside out, strangled by its own processes.

The Real Measure of Going Somewhere

“The more they track my miles, the less they care about where I’m going.”

Anna F. told me something while we were having coffee in a breakroom that smelled of burnt beans and 29-day-old muffins. She’s right. We are tracking the life out of our organizations. We are measuring the speed of the treadmill without noticing that the treadmill isn’t actually connected to the floor. We are running in place, generating 49 gigabytes of data about our ‘internal service quality’ while the actual output of the company remains stagnant. It’s a hollow victory.

So, what if we stopped? What if we burned the SLAs? What if, instead of an ‘Internal Helpdesk,’ we just had a ‘Help Desk’? What if we acknowledged that we are all on the same side of the ledger? It’s a terrifying thought for the middle managers who have built their entire careers on managing these transactional borders. But for the rest of us-for the Annas of the world and the people waiting for their 9th ticket escalation-it would be a liberation. We don’t need more customers. We need more colleagues who remember that the goal isn’t to close the ticket, but to solve the problem. Does the person sitting across from you really need a ‘service provider,’ or do they just need you to pick up the phone and say ‘I’ll take care of it’?