Office Chronicles #1 – Welcome to Widget Corp.
Widget Corp. was founded twenty‑five years ago by Robert Thompson and has heroically avoided progress ever since. While other companies sprinted into the future with
Age: 60
Mindset: 1997
Technological Skill: 0.8 out of 100
Confidence Level: 10,000 out of 100
Twice divorced with four kids he constantly complains about funding. He looks stressed, slightly hunched, with unruly grey hair and deep frown lines. He rotates the same three worn suits, always paired with loud, mismatched ties.
Technologically helpless, he can barely use his phone and refuses to deal with attachments. He runs the company like it’s still the late ’90s, resisting all modern tools and change. He operates under the firm belief that “modern tools complicate simple things,” which is why the company still stores important data in Excel files named:
“FINAL.xlsx”
“FINAL_REALLY_FINAL.xlsx”
“FINAL_THIS_TIME_I_MEAN_IT.xlsx”
And of course: “GREG_FIX_THIS.xlsx”
He tells lengthy stories no one asked for, laughs at jokes no one understands, and has a special gift for making every meeting last exactly 38 minutes longer than it should.
He tries to learn tech vocabulary by Googling terms like “API” and “the cloud,” but ends up using them incorrectly in sentences such as:
“Greg, can you upload this attachment into the cloud API so I can Bluetooth it to HR?”
Still, once every fiscal quarter, Robert makes a good decision — purely by accident — which keeps the company miraculously alive.
Widget Corp. was founded twenty‑five years ago by Robert Thompson and has heroically avoided progress ever since. While other companies sprinted into the future with