A Stealthy Propagation of Brownie Points |
There is a peculiar fantasy many of us carry—rarely admitted, often indulged.
The day we leave a job, they will not simply nod and move on.
There will be murmurs. Slack channels will combust. Someone will say, “This is a mistake.” Someone else will say it louder. Meetings will be called. Decisions will be questioned.
Not quite garments torn in the style of biblical grief, but close enough to suggest that our absence has weight.
And yet—because life has a cruel sense of humour—reality is quieter.
An email goes out. Warm, polished, faintly generic. A few genuinely kind messages arrive. Then calendars refill, chairs shift, logins are reassigned, and the system—however chaotic, inefficient, or faintly dysfunctional it may be—absorbs the loss.
No uprising. No rebellion.
I was allegedly not particularly good at my job.
Not spectacularly bad—no disasters worth retelling—but persistently, almost impressively, inconsistent. The same small mistakes, resurfacing with a kind of loyalty I could not inspire in anything else.
Some of that is mine.
Repetition should, in theory, lead to mastery. In my case, it occasionally led to… familiarity. I missed things I should have caught. I learned more slowly than was ideal. There is no elegance in pretending otherwise.
But not all of it is mine.
The tools were unreliable—software that stalled, systems that collapsed at inconvenient moments. Training was partial at best, absorbed in fragments, often under pressure rather than with clarity. Processes shifted, expectations moved, and feedback had a tendency to point out the flaw without always illuminating the fix.
None of this absolves the mistakes.
It does, however, explain why they proved so stubborn.
Which makes the fantasy even more absurd.
Because it is one thing to imagine disruption in the wake of brilliance. It is quite another to suspect that even in one’s mediocrity—one’s irritating, repetitive, very human inconsistency, under less-than-ideal conditions—something might still have mattered.
But here is the part that complicates things.
I kept the team in chocolate.
Not strategically. Not as a morale initiative with a budget line and a quarterly review. Just… because that is how I am built.
There were always snacks. Always something small, unnecessary, faintly indulgent. A quiet offering to the room: here, have something sweet, life is difficult enough.
No one logged it. No one praised it in performance reviews. It did not reduce my error rate, tragically. It did not transform me into a model employee.
And when it disappears, it leaves a very specific kind of silence.
We like to believe value is measured in output. Clean, quantifiable, defensible.
But most of what holds a place together is not that.
It is the small, unrecorded things:
The person who brings chocolate.The one who softens the tone.The one who absorbs friction no one else has time for.
None of it appears on a spreadsheet. All of it is felt when it’s gone.
Which is why the neat verdict—not good enough—is so appealing.
It erases complexity. It flattens everything into a single, efficient conclusion.
It is also, more often than not, incomplete.
Because there is a difference between being bad at a job, being new or unsupported, being mismatched to the role, and being exhausted inside a system that quietly fries the brain and then asks why performance has dipped.
The same mistakes, repeated, are not always stupidity. Sometimes they are overload. Or unclear processes. Or feedback that critiques endlessly but rarely teaches.
And showing up—again and again—early, tired, still trying—that is not uselessness.
That is misalignment.
And still, none of this produces the fantasy.
No uprising. No resistance.
In Exodus 33, Moshe asks for something almost embarrassingly simple:
“If I have found favour in Your eyes—let me know.”
Not applause. Not spectacle.
Just confirmation that what he has done—imperfectly, persistently—counts.
He asks for more. “Show me Your glory.”
He does not get drama.
He gets something quieter.
Which is, inconveniently, the same here.
Not the exit. Not the email.
A drawer without chocolate.
A meeting that feels slightly sharper, slightly less forgiving.
A room that functions—more or less—but with less softness at the edges.
No one names it. No one escalates it.
And then, like Exodus 34, everything resets.
New tablets. Same covenant.
The system continues. Of course it does. Not because it is efficient or well-run, but because even flawed systems have a stubborn instinct for survival.
So the question isn’t whether they will tear their garments.
The question is whether anything of you—imperfect, inconsistent, occasionally exasperating, quietly generous—settled deeply enough to remain.
Not announced.Not defended.Not even properly acknowledged.
Which is a disappointing kind of legacy.
And, inconveniently, a very real one.