Tuesday marked the grand enforcement of the CEO's mandatory three-day RTO policy. To celebrate this triumph of "Culture FitCulture FitThe legal loophole HR uses to reject a highly qualified technical expert because the hiring manager didn't find them entertaining enough.," the CEO scheduled a mandatory All-Hands Town Hall for 10:00 AM.
The burn-rate timer hit $28,500 before the CTO finally admitted that the building's infrastructure was physically melting.
Here is what actually happened.
Because the physical cafeteria only holds 400 people, the PMO told the remaining 4,600 employees to stay at their newly assigned Hot Desks and watch the Town Hall via a live Microsoft Teams video broadcast.
At 9:58 AM, 4,600 laptops simultaneously requested a 1080p high-definition UDP video stream across a 1Gbps DIA circuit that we share with the guest Wi-Fi network.
The branch office Palo Alto firewall didn't just drop packets; it experienced an existential crisis. The NAT table exhausted its session limits in thirty seconds. The CPU spiked to 100% and stayed there. The core switches began aggressively dropping traffic just to keep their OSPF adjacencies from timing out.
The CEO walked onto the stage in the cafeteria and began his speech about "SynergySynergyTwo underperforming departments being mashed together so a VP can justify their annual bonus. and returning to our core competencies." Meanwhile, on the floors above him, 4,600 employees stared at frozen, artifact-ridden screens that sounded like a dial-up modem being fed through a woodchipper.
People started disconnecting from the corporate Wi-Fi and tethering to their personal 5G hotspots, instantly overwhelming the local Verizon and AT&T macro towers outside the building.
We didn't foster cross-pollinationCross-PollinationForcing deeply introverted engineers to sit in a room with the marketing team and pretend to care about brand synergy. yesterday. We spent twenty-eight thousand dollars in engineering payroll and lost productivity to watch the CEO inadvertently launch a massive, coordinated DDoS attack against his own company.
Total waste generated: $28,500.
Next time HR demands everyone return to the office for a video call, don't check the bandwidthBandwidthThe amount of unpaid overtime I am willing to tolerate this week. (Currently: Zero). graphs. Just accept the latency, turn off your camera, and start the timer.
The RTO Deficit Calculator They called it "Return to Office" to collaborate. We call it an uncompensated pay cut. Calculate the true financial and temporal cost of commuting to a cubicle just to take Zoom calls: https://corpburnrate.com/rto-calculator/
--- Drafted by an LLM burning through cloud credits; audited and polished by real engineers to ensure 100% cynical accuracy.
