Corporate Dysfunction

There's a famous internet post — the Forgotten Employee — about a man who got transferred so many times within his company that all paperwork on him was lost. After September 11th wiped out his department, a VP reassigned his responsibilities to another group via an email where his name appeared only in the CC field. He waited for someone to notice. Four months later, nobody had. He existed only as "a tick on the underbelly of the corporate warthog" — a four-digit paycheck hitting his bank account every other Thursday, generated by a computer program that no human being ever reviewed.¹

Too senior to fire, too invisible to bother, the Forgotten Employee spent his days browsing the internet, taking twenty-five cigarette breaks, and roaming hallways with a coffee mug and a piece of paper, performing the semiotics of busyness. At one point he was nearly outed in an HR meeting. He escaped only by calling his own work cell phone from his wife's phone hidden in his pocket, faking an urgent call and walking out.

The story reads as comedy, but the economics are real. This man was a pure deadweight cost, drawing salary for years to produce nothing. And it happened not because the company was badly managed in some unusual way, but because the standard mechanisms of corporate management — org charts, performance reviews, departmental budgets — are fragile enough that a few transfers can make a salaried employee completely invisible.

Half a Million in Five Minutes

The Forgotten Employee is funny because the waste is small — one salary. The Ludicity blog post "I Accidentally Saved Half A Million Dollars" describes waste at industrial scale, and it's less funny because someone lost their job the week before the fix.²

The setup: a company spent years building an "Advanced Analytics Platform" that was perpetually about to launch. When it finally did, the entire thing was stitched together with spreadsheets parsed by Python, dropped into S3, parsed by Lambdas into more S3, picked up by MongoDB, passed through another Lambda into S3 again, pulled into Snowflake via Snowpipe, and then pivoted by a JavaScript stored procedure. All of this to upload a 2KB CSV containing database access roles. This was considered "more auditable."

The test suites had been failing for months. Someone had used the Unix tee command to log errors, but tee successfully executing was overwriting the error codes from the failing tests. Every Lambda function began with counter = 1 — a line copied from an early iteration that used to need a counter, propagated by senior engineers who never thought to question it. One file in the repository could delete production if moved to the wrong folder, complete with hardcoded admin credentials.

The database costs were running at roughly a million dollars per year against a budget of perhaps 200K. The author clicked five buttons in a GUI configuration panel — adjusting Snowflake warehouse sizing — and cut the bill by half a million.

The lesson isn't that the fix was easy. It's that the organizational structure made it impossible for the fix to happen through normal channels. The company had already cancelled someone's contract that week because of budget overruns — firing a person was easier than clicking the button the author told them to click. This is a coordination problem inside a single organization: the people who understood the problem had no authority, the people with authority didn't understand the problem, and the bureaucratic feedback loops that should connect knowledge to power were completely broken.

Institutionalized Corruption

The most brazenly dysfunctional institution in the queue isn't a corporation — it's the New York Police Department's "courtesy card" system. PBA (Patrolmen's Benevolent Association) cards are official, union-distributed cards that cops give to family and friends. Present one during a traffic stop and the officer will usually let you go. There are tiers: silver cards for citizens, gold for officers' families. The cards are sold on eBay — a gold New Jersey card goes for $114, a silver shield for $299.³

An officer who "writes over the card" — issues a ticket despite seeing one — risks retaliation. One officer posted on a cop chat room, in barely contained fury, that another officer had proceeded to write a speeding ticket on his wife despite seeing a PBA card: "I will find you." This isn't exaggeration for effect. Officers report finding their locker moved to the parking lot and filled with dog excrement after writing over a card.

The cards don't just go to family. Union officials distribute them to "politicians, judges, lawyers, businessmen, civil service workers and members of the news media." When the union cut the maximum cards per officer from 30 to 20, the rank and file was "livid." One retiree complained they couldn't hand them out as Christmas gifts anymore.

Alex Tabarrok called it "a Christmas gift of institutionalized corruption." It's also a market failure in miniature: the union restricting supply may have been trying to bump up its monopoly profit on the cards rather than addressing the corruption. The system persists because everyone with power to change it — officers, politicians, judges, media — is a beneficiary.