ANONYMOUS TO EVERYONE BUT MY BOSS

The day the company's annual anonymous survey broke, I contributed eighteen items all by myself. The deadliest one was the last: "Suggestion: the boss should hold fewer meetings.

If he really wants to talk, he can sign up for a broadcasting class instead of burning through everyone's life." Chapter 1 I wrote that at 11:13 on a Wednesday night.

I had just come out of a twoandahalfhour retro, and I wasn't entirely a person anymore. So when I finished writing it, I actually thought I'd shown restraint.

At 9:06 the next morning I got to the office and found a ring of empty space around my desk. Not because people were late. Everyone was in. Nobody dared sit next to me.

I set my bag down and asked Ruggles, "What are you all doing?" Ruggles didn't look at me.

He stared at his monitor like it was playing footage of his longlost child. "Frank." "Yeah?" "See you in the next life." Something dropped in my chest.

I checked the allhands channel. Nobody was talking. I checked my DMs. Twentyseven.

At the top was Ava, our intern: [Frankie!!!!!!!!] Below that, Jo: [Don't panic yet.] Below that, Ruggles: [I always knew this day would come for you.] I opened the annual employee satisfaction survey.

Page one, item one: [Suggestion: Office Ops should stop buying that lemon hand soap.

Washing your hands with it feels like you just peeled ten pounds of oranges.] Submitted by: Frankie Cardenas.

Item two: [Suggestion: no lastminute meetings at five thirty on a Friday.

Saying "let's just touch base real quick" at that hour is no different from a party of eighteen walking into a restaurant right before closing.] Submitted by: Frankie Cardenas.

Item three: [Suggestion: can we stop making department directors perform at the quarterly team event?

They are under no obligation, and we are guilty of no crime.] Submitted by: Frankie Cardenas. My vision went black for a second. I scrolled down. Item four.

Item five. … Item eighteen. Not one missing. Every one of them with my name on it.

My hands were shaking a little. "Wasn't this anonymous?" Ruggles finally deigned to look at me. "It was yesterday." "And today?" "Today you're the pioneer of the namedfeedback reform." I grabbed him. "Did you write anything?" He had.

His first item was just a suggestion to switch the coffee beans in the break room.

I had barely exhaled when he went quiet. "You don't have more, do you?" I looked at him. "More what?" His voice got very small. "Suggestion: expense reports shouldn't make me prove every single time that the person who took the rideshare was actually me." "What's so unspeakable about that?" "I ranted for three hundred and twenty words." I let go of him.

Good. I'll have company on the way to the gallows. I was about to keep scrolling when my phone rang. [Incoming call: Garrett Merrifield.] Our boss. I stared at the screen.

Ruggles had already slid his chair back a foot and a half. Ruggles told me to answer it.

I held the phone out toward him and said he was welcome to take it for me if he had the guts. His chair slid back a little further. "I can collect your personal effects.

I can't do your prison time." On the fifth ring I picked up. "Mr.

Merrifield." It was quiet on the other end. "Come to my office at ten." "Is now not a good time?" "What do you think?" I looked at the line on my screen about signing up for a broadcasting class. "No.

Now is really not a good time." Garrett paused for a second. "Ten." "Okay." After I hung up, Ruggles patted my shoulder. "Anything at your desk you want to take with you?" I thought about it. "The pothos." "Company property." I sighed. "Never mind, then." Chapter 2 At ten sharp I knocked and opened the door to Garrett's office.

He was sitting behind his desk with two things laid out in front of him. On the left, a printout of the eighteen items. On the right, a certification in broadcast announcing.

I stopped short. Garrett nudged the certificate an inch toward me. "Never took a broadcasting class." I didn't dare move. "Tested for it in college.

Passed with distinction." "…" He looked up at me. "So, item eighteen. Do you have any other solutions?" I stood in the doorway with exactly one thought in my head.

Had I actually driven this man insane? I didn't get fired. The whole company was extremely disappointed.

At 11:20 I came out of the boss's office, and a dozen heads came up in unison across the floor. I went left; their eyes went left. I went right; their eyes went right.

I stopped. "Enjoying the zoo?" Every head went down. Only Ava couldn't hold her curiosity in. She rolled her chair over and asked if I'd gotten chewed out. I said no.

She had just started to relax when I added, "He wants me to explain them one by one." The sympathy came right back onto Ava's face. "All eighteen?" "Every last one." Ava got a look that said she'd rather have taken the chewing out.

So would I. Garrett had sorted the eighteen into three categories by severity. Category one: things he could fix immediately. The hand soap, for instance.

Office Ops could swap it out that afternoon. Category two: things that needed to be verified. Too many meetings, slow expense reports, weekend team events.

Category three: the ones he stared at for a long time without understanding why I'd written them.

Like item eleven: [Suggestion: don't put the coffee machine outside a director's office. We just want coffee.

We're not there to check in with management.] Garrett asked, "People are afraid to go?" "It's not fear," I said. Garrett asked what exactly was inconvenient about it.

So I reconstructed the scene for him. First time you walk past, Pennington, our director, says good morning. Second time, he asks if you're having coffee again.

Third time, he starts worrying about your heart.

When I finished, Garrett said, "You don't have to answer him." "The problem is he starts it." Garrett thought about it. "What does he say?" "First time, 'Morning.' Second time, 'Coffee again?' Third time, 'Cut back, that's bad for your heart.'" Garrett was silent.

I gave him a look. "Do you get it now?" "A little." By noon that day the coffee machine had been moved to the far end of the break room.

At two, Pennington stood holding his mug in the spot where the machine used to be, as lost as a man whose house had been torn down.

He asked Office Ops, "Where's the coffee machine?" The person from Office Ops pointed toward the back. "Mr.

Merrifield said it's more convenient over there." On his way over, Pennington passed my desk.

He stopped. "Was that you?" I denied it on reflex. "Not me." Next to me, Ava was coughing herself to death. Pennington looked at me. I looked at him.

Three seconds later, I admitted it. "It was me." "Why?" "You care too much about our hearts." Pennington didn't say anything. By four, the whole company knew I hadn't been fired.

By four thirty, a second rumor had started: I was related to Garrett. By five, the version had been upgraded. I might be a daughter the chairman had outside his marriage.

I went to the restroom to wash my hands. Two people from Marketing were talking in the stalls. "Seriously, who else would dare write eighteen of them?" "She's a Cardenas.

The chairman isn't a Cardenas." Chapter 3 "What if she took her mom's name?" I finished washing my hands in silence, and ran into Jo on my way out.

She saw my face. "What's wrong?" "I just found out my dad might not be my dad." "…" Jo told me people were just bored and I shouldn't take it to heart. I said that part was fine.

Mostly I was considering whether to call my mom tonight and ask. "Ask her what?" "Whether my dad is my dad." Jo lost it and laughed.

She runs HR, and she was the biggest casualty of the anonymous survey incident. The survey vendor had pushed a bad update to the backend.

Employee ID numbers that were only supposed to be visible to HR got mapped straight to names. She had apologized eight hundred times already that day.

I asked, "Is the vendor still alive?" "Alive." "You're very patient." "Legal won't let me kill them." She patted my arm. "Mr.

Merrifield says there's a leadership meeting this afternoon to deal with the anonymity failure first." "Another meeting?" Jo looked at me. I shut up immediately.

At five thirty an announcement went out in the channel: [Effective tomorrow, nonessential recurring meetings are canceled.

Crossteam meetings default to thirty minutes; anything longer requires a stated reason.

No new nonurgent meetings booked after 5:00 p.m. on Fridays.] The floor was quiet for ten seconds. Ruggles rose slowly to his feet and gave me a deep bow. "Commissioner Cardenas.

On behalf of the huddled working masses of this floor, we thank you." I told him to get lost, and reminded him that if he kept performing I would personally withdraw the coffee bean item.

He sat down immediately. The real trouble came on the third day. There was a piece of paper in my drawer. Unsigned.

It said: [Suggestion: the company café should stop running the chef's innovation special every Wednesday.

Nobody has been held accountable for last week's blueberry roasted chicken.] I picked it up, read it for a long moment, and stuffed it back in.

Ten minutes later there was another one. [Suggestion: Sales Team One should stop chanting at their morning huddle.

The security guard downstairs can already recite "Own it, close it, win it."] I stuffed that one back in too. When I got back from lunch, the drawer wouldn't close.

I pulled it open. About forty pieces of paper. Some printed, some handwritten. There was even a sticky note: [Hook in the third stall of the women's room is broken.

Save our bags.] I took the sticky note over to Ruggles. "What is this supposed to be?" Ruggles was gnawing on a chicken leg. He said it was the will of the people.

I asked what that made me.

He thought about it. "A channel." "You think I'm 311?" "You're faster than that." I slapped the stack of paper down on his desk. "Take them." "They're not mine." "Then post in the channel and tell them to stop." Ruggles didn't move. "Why not?" He lowered his voice. "Because they think it works when you bring it up." I was about to swear at him when he added, "And some of them think you won't give up who wrote what." That stopped me.

After the anonymous survey blew up, what hurt most for a lot of people wasn't the boss seeing their complaints. It was their own manager seeing them.

Some people really had only written that the coffee was bad.

Others wrote: [Can performance conversations stop waiting until the last minute to tell me why I'm "below expectations"?] [Management says "everyone come in this weekend, voluntarily," and then the people who don't come get asked about their attitude at yearend.] [When a project goes wrong, whoever yells loudest is off the hook.

Is that reasonable?] These weren't very funny. And they didn't belong in my drawer.

I asked Ruggles, "Who told you all to do this?" Chapter 4 Ruggles swore nobody had organized it, and as for why everyone had suddenly started stuffing my drawer, he chalked it up to the wisdom of the masses.

I told him to pass along the next line while he was at it: if the people put anything else in my drawer, I'm calling the police.

Ruggles nodded. "I'll pass that along for you." At two in the afternoon, Garrett called me in. This time there was no certificate on the desk. Just a canvas tote. I recognized it.

It was mine. It said ALIVE IS ENOUGH on the side. I'd left it in a conference room the night before. Now it was bulging.

Garrett lifted it. "What is this?" My eyelid twitched. "That's my bag. The contents are private." Garrett didn't argue.

He just pushed across the piece of paper that had fallen out of the gap. [Suggestion: the boss should spend a day slumming and see what the work is actually like down here.

Stop asking "why does this take three days" every time you look at the slides. Try doing it yourself