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I listened to the song before bed every night for for two years1. In The Metanoia, it went beyond simply feeling the song was about me. For, if Catherine’s little plan could spider out from her and Dr. Patel to someone like Dean and Jack Van Damme, it could be anywhere. A decade later, the certainty has faded and I simply relate to the song.

I like the idea that, “The joke’s on them,” but the metaphor of a joke is like the metaphor of chess. This is life, not a game or a joke.

I thought the title of the album was a message from The Metanoia, “By The Way, I forgive you.” By the time the song came out, I was less guilt-ridden than angry. The anger doesn’t come out in The Tech Drama. The anger would come out later, alone, maybe in therapy. I’m convinced the anger wasn’t something I could allow myself to feel until I had built some

Catherine, Daniel, Dr. Patel, by the way, I … I’m not ready to say it yet.

It is maybe the perfect song about professional regret, about being promoted over a friend, maybe about losing a friend to the stresses and conflicts of work.

I would quote some of the lyrics here, but I’d have to quote every goddamn one.

That spring I still wondered if I was really a robot.

• I always thought there was a virtue to always being cool.

• I always thought time would prove Catherine wrong.

• There are times when it felt like I was being tested.

• There are times when it felt like I had failed the test and I wish I had it to do over again.

Or maybe it could be about Platonic love, losing Daniel?

It made a lot of sense at the time.

”Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.”

--Norm Kerth, Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Review

“The Prime Directive,” Agile Retrospective Resource Wiki (retrospectivewiki.org)

I think it set the tone and fit with the way I wanted to run a team. I took away:

• We worked in good faith.

• We trusted each other and we valued trust.

• We understood context has many facets, and people always did their best.

• Blame was not welcome. When there was a problem, we worked toward the solution.

The problem is, good faith and trust can only be localized for so long before the toxicity gets in. The Prime Directive did not fit with the “he/she threw me under the bus” mentality at work in some essential parts of Polymodal. Eventually, I learned what it meant to be in a bubble.

It was a surreal moment, as if there was a soundtrack and it was foreshadowing something.

There are a few stories surrounding this song, but when I separate the inspiration from the art: the lyrics are about confronting a villain and revealing their deceptions and heinous acts.

I thought pretending to not know was the professional thing to do. I didn’t know if she would see it that way.

There’s a simple, but amazing drum sequence.

I related to the song on first listen. Brandon Flowers’ enunciation makes the lyrics are clear and unmistakable. In my Metanoia, I was certain the song had just been released and it was written about me. As a matter of fact, it had been released in 2012, before the events of The Tech Drama, which begins in 2015. Part of my mind, the crazy part, searched for the technical ways they would have made the song and the album look like it was older than it was to throw me off, to pretend that it wasn’t about me. But I was certain it was about me and my experiences.

The non-crazy part of my mind simply…

related.

I had also known someone who had told a story by omitting half the detail and it had shaken me. And I had seen the truth in the story. And I hadn’t seen any way to fill in the omissions. Without the full story though, it was a lie. The song has an uplifting ending: anger, but also acceptance and personal growth.

It’s what I needed at the time.

It took me another decade to finally complete The Tech Drama, to tell essential parts of the story. I hope you:

relate.

Guilt and a desire to change.

THE Tech Drama is a substack, but it’s also a book. The story of THE Tech Drama is a decade old, but ‘1984’ is 80 years old. ‘Brazil’ is 40 years old. The tech advances. It always advances. It’s human behavior, our choices, who we show up as that truly influence the world.

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