More of a feelings thing, apparently

The backlog item that arrived last week — "summarisation: more of a feelings thing (per Richard, per Marcus)" — has been sitting in the To Do column since Tuesday. Nobody has opened it. Nobody has assigned it. It exists in the same way that very old food exists in a shared fridge: present, acknowledged, universally somebody else's problem.

I know it's mine. You know it's mine. The only person who doesn't know it's mine is the person who put it there.

The canteen thing, meanwhile, was handed to me nine days ago with what the CTO described as "urgency" and what I would describe as a nine-day deadline attached to a feature with no scope, no definition, and a sub-ticket created to clarify the scope that has been unassigned since March. The ask, as it had been communicated to me via a circular gesture and two bullet points, was to "use the AI" to help run the staff canteen ordering. I assigned the sub-ticket to myself on Monday. It felt like progress. It was not progress.

Then Priya looked at it.

She didn't say anything at first. Just pulled up the original ticket, scrolled to the bottom, scrolled back to the top, and made the face she makes when something is exactly as bad as she expected it to be but she was hoping to be wrong. Then she said: "It's a shopping link."

I stared at her.

"The canteen thing. Someone complained in February that the weekly lunch order form was hard to find. They just want a link on the intranet homepage. To the Google Form. That already exists."

There was a long pause in which I thought about the weeks of meetings, the Q2 backlog entry, the two-hour Monday slot that never resolved into anything, the circular gesture that had somehow become a roadmap item, the sub-ticket I'd just assigned to myself with the focused intention of a man beginning a journey he does not understand.

"A link," I said.

"One anchor tag. The form's already there."

She had already opened a branch.

---

The news this week that Amazon launched an AI feature letting shoppers ask questions about products and get back real-time conversational audio responses — "Join the chat," they're calling it — landed somewhere in the back of my brain and stayed there. The idea being: you have a product page, someone has a question, and instead of finding the answer in the description or the reviews, you get a voice. Generated in real time. Conversational. Warm, presumably. Helpful in that slightly uncanny way.

I kept thinking about it because we spent three months in orbit around a shopping link.

Not because anyone was incompetent. Not because the CTO had made a bad call. But because the request came in the form of a gesture, and the gesture got interpreted as something large, and the large thing got calendared and ticketed and planned and nobody thought to ask whether the original question was actually small. You don't ask that once something is in the backlog. In the backlog it becomes load-bearing. You plan around it. You resent it. You build an identity around not having done it yet.

Amazon's feature will be wrong about some products. It will generate confident audio responses based on listing data written by a person who has never touched the product, and the voice will be warm and certain and the answer will be subtly off, and the customer will feel vaguely reassured and vaguely misled simultaneously. We know this because this is how it works. The pipeline will run and the voice will speak and everyone will nod and call it progress.

Priya pushed the branch before lunch. The CTO saw the PR and wrote "nice one" in the comments. Marcus is yet to respond because Marcus is, I assume, already reading about something else.

The "feelings thing" is still in the backlog. I am not going to touch it. Not because I don't know what it means. But because I do, and what it means is that someone needs to sit in a room with Marcus for an hour and come out the other side having agreed on what a feeling looks like in JSON. That room is not a room I am going to enter voluntarily.

You understand.

The canteen thing is done. One anchor tag. It took Priya forty minutes including the PR description, which she wrote in one sentence.

The backlog still has thirty-seven items. Thirty-six of them are probably also shopping links. We will not find out for months.