The 22-Click Receipt: A Modern Ritual

I am currently hovering over the ‘Submit’ button for a $12 coffee receipt, and my index finger is trembling with a specific kind of existential exhaustion. This is the 22nd click of the process. I have navigated through 12 separate dropdown menus, uploaded a PDF that I had to convert from a JPEG because the system doesn’t recognize images captured on a modern smartphone, and checked a box confirming that I am not, in fact, a money-laundering operative for a small state in the Baltics. This is the new ‘Streamlined Expense Experience’ that the company spent $2,002,222 on last year. It was supposed to liberate us. Instead, it has just given the old, suffocating bureaucracy a high-resolution coat of paint.

Yesterday, I gave the wrong directions to a tourist. They were looking for the cathedral, and I pointed them toward the industrial docks with a level of confidence that can only be described as pathological. There is a parallel here. We are all pointing each other toward the docks while promising a cathedral. We buy the software, we sign the 32-page contract, and we tell our teams that ‘transformation’ is here, knowing full well that we haven’t changed a single underlying habit. We are just digitizing the same old mess, making bad habits travel at the speed of light.

The Ritual Over the Solution

Atlas G.H., a queue management specialist I met during a particularly grueling 52-hour consulting stint in Chicago, once told me that most people don’t actually want a solution; they want a ritual. Atlas spent his life looking at how people wait. He told me that when you give a company a tool to eliminate a queue, they often find a way to reintroduce the delay somewhere else. It’s a conservation of misery.

This isn’t a failure of technology. It’s a failure of nerve. It is organizational cowardice. To actually fix the process would require looking at why we need a signature for a $12 coffee in the first place. But confronting that is hard. It involves uncomfortable conversations in 12-person meetings where everyone stares at their shoes. It is much easier to buy a $222,002 software package and tell the board that we are ‘leveraging AI-driven fiscal oversight.’

The Failure of Nerve and the Digital Exorcism

We treat technology like an exorcism. We think that by splashing some ‘digital’ holy water on the business, the demons of inefficiency will simply vanish. But the demons are the ones who wrote the requirements for the software. They are the ones who insisted that the 12-step approval process remain intact because ‘that’s how we’ve always ensured compliance.’

I think about that tourist often now. I wonder if they ever found the cathedral or if they are still wandering among the 52-foot shipping containers, looking for a stained-glass window that doesn’t exist. In many ways, our employees are that tourist. We give them a map that we know is wrong, and then we act surprised when they end up at the docks.

The Recursive Loop of Labor

I’ve spent the last 32 minutes trying to figure out why the system rejected my receipt for the third time. It turns out, I didn’t include the ‘Merchant Category Code,’ which I had to look up in a 102-page PDF. This is the ‘efficiency’ we were promised. It’s a recursive loop of administrative labor where the employee becomes the unpaid data entry clerk for a system that was supposed to replace the clerk.

Most executives are like me with a pipe wrench. They see a leak-‘slow expense processing’-and try to fix it by tightening the digital screws. But the leak is a symptom of a much deeper rot in the foundation. If you digitize distrust, you just get automated suspicion.

The Kiosk Analogy: Digital Reenactment

I saw a similar pattern at a health clinic recently. They installed sleek kiosks for check-ins. But the kiosks were constantly out of sync with the back-end database. So, the elderly patients would stand there, confused, for 12 minutes, only to have a frustrated nurse come out and manually enter their data into a tablet anyway. It was a digital reenactment of a waiting room, just with more blue light and less eye contact.

It’s the kind of thing that makes you miss the old-school care of a place like

White Rock Naturopathic, where the focus hasn’t been buried under layers of unnecessary tech-debt. We need to remember that the goal of any process isn’t the process itself; it’s the outcome.

The Shell Game of Savings

I’m looking at my screen again. The $12 receipt has finally been accepted. But I’ve lost 42 minutes of my life to a task that should have taken 2. If you multiply that by the 1002 employees in this division, the ‘efficiency’ of this software is actually costing the company thousands of hours of productive time every single month.

On the balance sheet, it looks like a success because ‘Administrative Costs’ have been shifted from the finance department to the individual employees. We aren’t saving money; we’re just hiding the waste in the margins of everyone’s day.

The Refusal to Play

I keep thinking about that tourist. By now, they’ve probably realized they are in the wrong place… But in our corporate lives, there are no taxis back from a failed digital transformation. We are stuck in the docks, staring at a map that tells us we are standing in the middle of a beautiful nave.

Sometimes, the only way to win the game is to refuse to play the digital version of it. I just hope that tourist found their way home, and I hope one day, we find our way back to processes that actually serve the people who use them, rather than the ghosts of the problems we were too afraid to solve.