Our ultra-modern workforce of highly skilled, exclusively good-looking knowledge workers with disciplines across engineering, software development, finance, nepotism, accounting, research & development, marketing, rocketry, gigantic dino-robot building, other robotics stuff we don’t understand that somehow involves insurance, human resources, whatever it is our Artists & Repertoire (A&R) division does, data analytics, legal, plus even more, appears to be suffering from an ailment to their collective morale that we 100% blame on the biggest blight every placed upon the planet:
The Hard Return.
Slack, Discord, iMessage, that creepy IBM Watson AI one…all of it, rife with Hard Returns.
Okay, after conferring with Valentina, who heads up our ever-active “Crisis Communications” strike force and apparently studies the impact of technology on our lives as a side hustle, it turns out that the problem is less about the Hard Return and more about the chat’s human engineered interface that forever encourages the proliferation of the Hard Return.
But first, to be clear, let’s define the Hard Return.
What A Hard Return Looks Like
It looks like this:
That’s right, literally thousands of sober German data scientists in Luzerberzerstien Daseschberg confirmed that the code that represents a Hard Return, when run through Don’t Kill The Magic’s proprietary Turn Code Into Animals software that we sell exclusively to scientists in northwest Germany, comes out as a blood sucking death eel worm in dirty water.
What A Hard Return Actually Is
Striking the “Enter” or “Return” key whilst typing to create a new line, breaking up what should be a continuous sentence or paragraph (a.k.a. “thought”) into choppy, fragmented pieces…not unlike the process a butcher uses to transform chuck roast into stew meat, although eventually stew meat is coalesced into a single, identifiable menu item, whereas the results of a hard return simply lead to a chaotic potpourri of frustration, confusion, anxiety, and panic.
What A Hard Return Looks Like On Any Chat Or Messaging Platform Including On Your Phone
Sarah Chen – Marketing Director Today at 2:47 PM
Hey team
So I was thinking about the Q3 campaign and I think we need to pivot our messaging strategy
Because the current approach isn’t really resonating with our target demographic
Based on the latest market research data that came in yesterday
From the analytics team
What do you all think?
Should we schedule a brainstorming session
For early next week?
Let me know your availability
Thanks!
What That Sounds Like To The Recipients
Ping
Ping
Ping
Ping
Ping
Ping
Ping
Ping
Ping
Ping
But it can get worse….
What A Worse Hard Return Looks Like On Any Chat Or Messaging Platform Including On Your Phone
Brad Douche – VP of Strategic Initiatives Today at 3:23 PM
Team
I wanted to circle back on our omnichannel customer journey optimization initiative
We need to deep dive into our core value propositions and really drill down on our low-hanging fruit
to maximize our ROI
and drive synergistic solutions
That will move the needle
On our KPIs
Let’s leverage our best practices and think outside the box
To ideate some game-changing
paradigm shifts that align with our
North star metrics
Can we touch base offline to socialize this vision
And get buy-in from all stakeholders?
Let’s make sure
We’re all on the same page moving forward
Thanks for your bandwidth
What That Sounds Like To The Poor Bastard Recipients
Ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping
The bottom line is typing your message all spasmodically while you’re sweating and adrenalized and expecting that it will be clear, understood, helpful, or even read is the equivalent of shouting into your phone on speaker during the halftime show of the Super Bowl, particularly when the artist is say Beyoncé or Travis Scott, and expecting to be heard.
What A Person Who Is Hard Returning Is Feeling While They Are Hard Returning
That’s right. They’re tantrum-ing, freaking out, stressed out, drinking buckets of cortisol, auguring in, imploding, exploding, or whatever other word that describes “losing it.” Because their poor little brains think there’s ABSOLUTLEY NO TIME TO GET THE WORLD’S MOST IMPORTANT MESSAGE ABOUT A TASK OR SPONTANEOUS MEETING OR RECURRING MEETING OR GROCERIES OR THE BAHN MI THEY JUST ATE OUT THERE AS ONE COMPLETE THOUGHT SO IT’S OKAY FINGERS JUST GO FOR IT SMATTER SOME STUFF ON THAT KEYBOARD I’LL CATCH UP LATER AFTER I DIE.
Which our aforementioned reclusive German scientist/customers trace to the oxygen-less state of the brain given the mounting fear people experience as they frenetically try and do 20 things at once (the primary cause of the Hard Return) causes any dedicated multitasker to hold their breath—as in, literally not breathe.
Granted they’re unaware they are not breathing, but still, they’re holding their breath. Literally, sometimes for an entire workweek. Or career. It’s super unhealthy.
What A Person Who Is Getting Hard Returned Is Feeling While They Are Getting Hard Returned
That’s right. The outcome of reading and responding to a chaotic potpourri of frustration, confusion, anxiety, and panic is exhaustion, surrender, apathy, and ultimately only semi-discreet web searches for “how to become a successful drug trafficker” followed closely by “cheap, single-engine Cessna flight training” because frankly, it just doesn’t matter anymore.
The Real Culprit: Chat Is Basically a Psychological Weapon
According to Valentina’s extensive research (which she conducts between crisis communications emergencies, 100% of which involve our dino robots), the Hard Return isn’t actually the villain.
The real villain is the chat interface itself, which was apparently designed by Nazis who deeply understood human psychology and decided to weaponize it against us.
With each Hard Return, we get little dopamine hits. Our brains think we accomplished something. Meanwhile, the interface, what with its dead eyes and preference for sucking our life force given that’s the only way the interface can continue to exist, is sitting there like our former Health & Wellness Director’s crack dealer, offering just a bit more dopamine for just a bit more of our attention.
Plus, these apps train us to think in fragments by making every single line break feel like a complete thought. The little typing indicators, the immediate delivery confirmations, the way messages stack up like digital Jenga blocks—it’s all engineered to make us think we’re having a conversation when really we’re just machine-gunning our consciousness all over everyone else’s screen.
It’s like if someone designed a pen that made us feel accomplished every time we lifted it off the paper, so instead of writing complete sentences, we’d just dot dot dot and draw phallic symbols as a way through life, thinking we’re were being productive while actually creating an incomprehensible mess that would make a Jackson Pollock painting look like a technical manual.
The interface has basically turned us all into digital toddlers having emotional outbursts in text form, one fragmented thought at a time.
But There’s Good News
Actually that’s not true: there is no good news. You can go home now.
Wait!
We have this new Director of Strength Training from Romania, Mihaela Petrescu. We hired her because we literally want to beat up this one start-up company that looks like they will be a threat to our market share.
Anyway, she just said she got into another fight with our obnoxious interns (that’s what you get for hiring college kids from the Bay Area) over how they overshare their personal info on social media, and they caught wind of this Hard Return ailment affecting our team morale, and they said they’ll lead our latest Continuing Education For Management & Leadership Ultimate Paradigm Program class, and they call it:
Why. Not. Us.
If air traffic controllers, pilots, firefighters, Navy SEALs, and all those other service disciplines can train their people to be calm on the radio—which they do because they know, scientifically, that calm breeds calm—why can’t we train our labor costs…ah, we mean, our beloved team members…to be calm in the first place, and thereby resist the cunningly over-engineered temptation to do the chat tool’s dopamine generating bidding?
We’re all for it. We’re even making NO HARD RETURNS t-shirts, coffee mugs, dog vests, soup ladles, and water coolers, and distributing to staff for free*.
(*A small service charge will automatically deduct $5.72 per pay period per employee for ten years, but hey, somebody’s got to keep the lights on.)
And of course we’ll turn this into a NO HARD RETURNS business-to-business e-commerce webstore so other struggling organizations can benefit from our storied work. Plus we’ll use that revenue to help pay for our former Health & Wellness Director’s mounting legal fees—they’re really piling up.
Hey, today just got way better for a bunch of people!
Want to know what to do next? Who doesn’t? Maybe read one of Oprah’s books, we heard she’s real good and determining the next best move. Once you’re bored of that go ahead and share this article with your most despised Hard Returner: maybe they’ll get the message, maybe not, but what else can you do, you know?