Efficiently Useless
(short version)

Based on Exodus 24:12-18 – Moses disappears into God’s presence for forty days.

When Martin went up the metal stairs, he said, “I’ll be back when it’s sorted.”

That was all.

No time frame. No explanation. Just a clipboard under his arm and a look that suggested the upper level was about to become very important.

Everyone watched him climb. The stairs rattled in their usual way. The door at the top shut with the heavy clunk it always made.

They waited for it to open again.

It did not.

At first, nobody minded.

Frank leaned on a railing. Priya checked her watch. Joey kicked at a stray bolt on the floor. The machines idled with a low, patient hum that slowly began to sound louder than usual.

“Must be something big,” said Darren.

“Yeah,” said Priya. “He looked serious.”

They all looked up at the door again.

After twenty minutes, the hum of the machines felt ridiculous. Like the building was clearing its throat over and over.

“Should we… keep going?” Joey asked.

“With what?” said Priya.

Nobody answered.

Frank folded his arms. “He said he’d be back when it’s sorted.”

They nodded. That seemed reasonable.

They waited.

After an hour, chairs appeared. Someone made tea. A few people stood near the bottom of the stairs as if proximity might help.

Continue reading the full story here.

Efficiently Useless

Based on Exodus 24:12-18 – Moses disappears into God’s presence for forty days.

When Martin went up the metal stairs, he said, “I’ll be back when it’s sorted.”

That was all.

No time frame. No explanation. Just a clipboard under his arm and a look that suggested the upper level was about to become very important.

Everyone watched him climb. The stairs rattled in their usual way. The door at the top shut with the heavy clunk it always made.

They waited for it to open again.

It did not.

At first, nobody minded.

Frank leaned on a railing. Priya checked her watch. Joey kicked at a stray bolt on the floor. The machines idled with a low, patient hum that slowly began to sound louder than usual.

“Must be something big,” said Darren.

“Yeah,” said Priya. “He looked serious.”

They all looked up at the door again.

After twenty minutes, the hum of the machines felt ridiculous. Like the building was clearing its throat over and over.

“Should we… keep going?” Joey asked.

“With what?” said Priya.

Nobody answered.

Frank folded his arms. “He said he’d be back when it’s sorted.”

They nodded. That seemed reasonable.

They waited.

After an hour, chairs appeared. Someone made tea. A few people stood near the bottom of the stairs as if proximity might help.

Then Kelly arrived from the other side of the building.

“Has he come down yet?”

They shook their heads.

Kelly frowned. “That’s interesting.”

“What is?” said Darren.

“I heard something about this,” Kelly said, lowering her voice slightly, which immediately made everyone lean in. “Head office has been running assessments like this in other places.”

“What sort of assessments?” asked Priya.

Kelly shrugged in a way that suggested she knew more than she was willing to say. “Structural. Operational. Cultural.”

“Cultural?” said Joey.

Kelly nodded gravely. “They watch how people respond.”

“Respond to what?”

“To uncertainty.”

They all looked at the stairs again.

By lunchtime, the machines were off.

No one could quite say who had switched them off or why, but it seemed rude to let them run when everyone was standing around doing nothing.

Frank called everyone into the break room.

“We should probably talk about this.”

Chairs scraped. Someone found a whiteboard marker. Priya began writing the date at the top out of habit.

“So,” said Frank. “He’s been up there a while.”

“Longer than usual,” said Darren.

Kelly nodded. “Exactly.”

“Exactly what?” asked Joey.

Kelly hesitated, then committed. “I don’t think he’s up there alone.”

There was a silence.

“What do you mean?” Priya asked.

“I mean,” said Kelly, “this feels coordinated.”

“With who?” said Frank.

Kelly glanced at the ceiling. “Them.”

Nobody laughed.

By mid-afternoon, there were three theories on the whiteboard:

1. Accident
2. Assessment
3. Restructure

They circled “Assessment” twice.

“This can’t just be waiting,” said Priya. “We need to be proactive.”

“Yes,” said Frank, relieved. “Exactly. Proactive.”

They formed a group.

Darren fetched more markers. Joey drew arrows between things. Priya wrote headings: Communication. Continuity. Leadership.

Kelly stood near the whiteboard and said, “We should assume we’re being observed.”

That made everyone sit up straighter.

“What if,” said Joey slowly, “the real problem is that everything depends on one person?”

They all nodded.

“That’s true,” said Priya. “We don’t actually know what to do without him.”

“Exactly,” said Joey. “That’s the flaw.”

Frank tapped the table. “So we fix the flaw.”

“How?” said Darren.

There was a long pause.

Then Priya said, “What if we let the system tell us what to do?”

“What system?” asked Frank.

Priya looked at her laptop. “We’ve got years of data. Production numbers. Schedules. Performance reports. If we fed it into one of those AI platforms…”

They all stared at her.

“It could generate optimal instructions,” she said. “Without needing him.”

Kelly’s eyes widened. “That’s brilliant.”

Joey nodded eagerly. “We remove the dependency.”

Frank clapped his hands once. “Yes. Yes, this is good. This is proactive.”

They gathered around Priya’s laptop like campers around a fire.

She typed. Darren fetched old reports. Joey plugged in a hard drive. Kelly hovered, whispering, “This is exactly the sort of thing they want to see.”

The first output appeared on the screen.

A clean list of instructions.

Recommended task allocations. Adjusted production sequence. Predicted outcomes.

They all stared.

“That’s… actually very good,” said Frank.

“It knows the place better than we do,” said Darren.

Priya printed the page. The printer whirred with a sense of occasion.

Kelly folded her arms. “I knew this was coming.”

By the next morning, the AI had a name.

“Have you asked it?” Joey would say.

“The system suggests,” Priya would begin.

Frank taped printouts to the wall. Darren followed them like a recipe. Kelly nodded sagely at every recommendation.

People began saying things like, “The system says,” and, “According to the model,” and, “We should trust the data.”

The machines were running again.

Faster than before.

Smoother than before.

By the third day, they were proud.

“We’ve basically fixed the place,” said Frank.

“We didn’t need him after all,” said Joey.

Kelly smiled knowingly. “That was the test.”

On the fourth morning, the metal stairs rattled again, and the door at the top clanged open. Martin stepped onto the floor, dust on his sleeves, clipboard in hand.

Nobody noticed at first, too busy arranging printouts, checking glowing screens, and consulting the AI system they had named Atlas.

“Morning,” Martin said.

Heads snapped up. Frank grinned. “You’re back!”

Martin looked around. Whiteboards full of flowcharts. Printouts taped to the walls. Atlas humming quietly. Everyone standing tall, proud.

Priya rushed forward. “We solved the dependency problem. We’ve been following Atlas’s instructions. Production is now fully optimised!”

Martin squinted at the printed parts schedule. “Optimised?”

“Yes!” Joey said, pointing at a pile of gleaming new parts. “Atlas suggested slight changes to the design—more efficient, better throughput. We followed it to the letter.”

Martin picked up one part. Turned it over in his hand. Then another. His brow furrowed.

“They’re… slightly off,” he said.

“We followed the instructions exactly,” Priya said, confused.

Martin held the part up, looking at the machine it was supposed to fit into. “These won’t go where they’re meant to. The tolerances… they’ve changed. Everything else is ready, but this…” He shook his head. “You’ve optimised for efficiency, but you’ve broken the product.”

Everyone looked at each other. Frank’s confident smile faltered. Joey swallowed hard. Kelly whispered, “We… we didn’t think about the size.”

Martin placed the parts down. He glanced at the screens of Atlas, humming softly, giving perfect instructions that had been blindly followed.

“The AI isn’t wrong,” he said finally. “It’s clever, precise, it knows how to optimise production—but it doesn’t know what we need. And you… stopped thinking. The old system worked just fine.”

The room went quiet. Slowly, everyone looked at the idle machines, the neatly stacked printouts, the charts on the walls. All the effort, all the committees, all the confidence—they had built a golden calf.

Martin sighed. “I went up there to fix the old system. Nothing was broken. We didn’t need another one.”

Darren muttered, “But… it’s so efficient.”

Martin shook his head. “Yes. Efficiently useless.”

Priya swallowed. Joey groaned. Frank just blinked. And somewhere, Atlas hummed on, perfectly obedient, perfectly logical, and completely incapable of understanding why anyone was standing around looking defeated.