Chapter 8
One column, many truths
Gary knows better.
At least, he thinks he does.
But today is busy.
A customer is waiting.
The phone rings.
So Gary takes a shortcut.
The easy solution
Two email addresses.
Gary separates them with a comma.
It fits.
Nothing complains.
Nothing breaks.
He moves on.
It works — for a while
At first, everything is fine.
Gary knows which email to use.
He recognizes the pattern.
He remembers why there are two.
When he looks at the cell,
he sees meaning — not just text.
The system feels flexible.
Helpful, even.
Small questions start to cost more
Later, Gary pauses.
Which email is the main one?
Which one should be used for promotions?
Which one was added most recently?
The answers exist.
But they’re not in the system.
They’re in Gary’s head.
The structure stays quiet
The spreadsheet doesn’t know which email matters.
It can’t tell one from the other.
It can’t help Gary decide.
All meaning is implicit.
The work moves back to the person
Gary starts compensating.
He remembers conventions: - “The first email is usually the main one” - “The second one is probably work”
He double-checks before sending anything.
He hesitates more often.
The structure hasn’t failed.
But it isn’t helping anymore.
This is how systems drift
Nothing went wrong in a single moment.
There was no mistake to fix.
No rule to enforce.
Just a series of small decisions
that pushed meaning out of the system
and into Gary’s memory.
The system stayed flexible.
Gary became the constraint.
Continue reading
In the next chapter, Gary slows down.
Not to add more structure — but to decide what not to model.