Progress and Poopery

[substitute]

I lamented last year that we technology people at my job had created a not particularly complex system and in two years had totally lost our grip on how it worked, so that large portions of it were opaque and mysterious, with "No Touch" signs on them. This depressed me, and put me in mind of the general state of humanity and our poor collapsing Towers of Babel in which we take such pride, etc.

We rebuilt our Tower, using new and better tools, and rules that kept us from our previous folly. There were great resolutions passed, Five-Year Plans approved by the Central Committee. Happy days were here again.

We built a new system from scratch. Two months later, it is full of mystery and fear. People use the passive: "It keeps doing that" or "It doesn't seem to do this properly" or "I don't know why it did that". This is something we built! Our Frankenstein's monster, our golem, our own little Pokémon.

I predict this trend will accelerate, and the next project will be built at the same time that we fail to comprehend it, so that we're slaving away on incomprehensible tasks to build something we can't conceive in our minds, like Richard Dreyfuss building his Devil's Tower in the living room in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind".

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MASHED POTATO TOWER OF DOOM