The export progress bar has been stuck at 86 percent for nearly six minutes, which is long enough for the fan in my MacBook to start sounding like a jet engine preparing for takeoff. I can feel the vibration through the aluminum casing against my palms, a tactile reminder that the machine is struggling with a task it was supposedly built to handle with ease. I tried to go to bed early last night-10:06 PM was the goal-but here I am, staring at a frozen UI because the backend architecture of this grading software was seemingly held together by digital duct tape and the prayers of overworked sysadmins.

This is the reality for those of us who have become the unofficial, unpaid damage-control departments for broken systems we did not design. Whether it is a teacher navigating a buggy learning management system or a data analyst manually cleaning 146 rows of corrupted entries because the script failed, the story is the same. We are the human buffers. We absorb the friction that the software creates, and in doing so, we unintentionally signal to the higher-ups that all things are functioning perfectly. After all, if the report gets turned in on time, why would the principal or the CEO think the tool is broken? They don’t see the 46 minutes of frantic troubleshooting that happened behind the scenes. They only see the result.

The Illusion of Service

I made a mistake earlier this year while teaching a unit on digital citizenship. I told my students that technology is a tool meant to serve human intent. That was a lie, or at least a half-truth that ignored the weight of legacy debt. The truth is that many systems are parasitic. They require constant, manual intervention just to maintain the illusion of stability. I spent 26 hours that month alone fixing sync errors between the school’s attendance portal and my own records. I didn’t get paid for those 26 hours. I didn’t get a ‘thank you.’ I got more work, because being the person who knows the workaround makes you the person who is forever responsible for the workaround.

There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from being too competent in a dysfunctional environment. You become a load-bearing wall in a building that was never meant to have more than one story. The entire team starts to rely on your ability to bypass the errors, to remember the specific sequence of clicks that prevents a crash, and to translate the cryptic error codes that look like 406 or 506 into plain English. You are not an employee at that point; you are a prosthetic for a crippled infrastructure.

The Cost of Resilience

In my classroom, I see the same patterns emerging in how students interact with their devices. I watch a kid spend 16 minutes trying to figure out why their cloud-based document won’t save, only to discover that the district’s firewall is blocking the very service they’ve been told to use. Instead of reporting the systemic issue, the kid just hotspots their phone and keeps working. They have already learned the lesson of the modern workplace: the system is broken, so you must find a way to break yourself just enough to fix it. This is the core frustration of the high performer. We are praised for our resilience, but resilience is often just a fancy word for ‘willingness to tolerate avoidable failure.’

Organizations call us high performers, but we are actually just subsidizing their technical debt. If I spend six hours a week fixing a data pipeline, the organization is effectively saving the cost of a developer’s time by stealing mine. It is a quiet, insidious form of wage theft. The leadership never feels the full cost of their bad decisions because the ‘heroes’ on the ground are masking the pain. If we all stopped fixing the systems for just 36 hours, the entire facade would crumble. But we don’t stop, because we care about the students, the clients, or the mission. Our empathy is weaponized against us.

I remember an old server we had back in 2016. It would overheat if you ran more than six concurrent processes. Instead of replacing the cooling unit, the IT director just told us to keep a physical desk fan pointed at the open rack. It worked, mostly. But it meant that someone had to remember to turn that fan on and off. It meant someone had to be there at 6:06 AM to make sure the room wasn’t too hot. That desk fan is a perfect metaphor for the modern competent worker. We are the fan. We are the cheap, external solution to an internal, structural flaw.

A New Philosophy

This is why I find the philosophy behind ems89 so refreshing. It acknowledges that when a process requires a hero, the process is the problem. In a world where we are taught to ‘hustle’ and ‘grind,’ we forget that a well-designed system should be invisible. It should not require a 46-page manual of exceptions and caveats. It should not require me to know that if I click ‘Save’ too quickly, I will lose 166 lines of progress. The digital citizenship I want to teach is not about how to survive in a digital wasteland of broken tools, but how to demand tools that actually respect our time and our cognitive load.

Discover more at ems89.co.

The Burden of Competence

I often think about the 76 different passwords I have to manage across various platforms at school. Each one has different requirements, different expiration dates, and different levels of security. I manage them because I am ‘digitally literate,’ but the mental energy spent on that management is energy I am not spending on my students. I am a teacher, yet 26 percent of my day is spent acting as a Tier 1 support technician for myself. We have accepted this as the status quo. We have normalized the idea that work is 56 percent doing the job and 44 percent fighting the tools needed to do the job.

There was a moment last Tuesday, around 3:36 PM, when I just stopped. A student asked me why their tablet wasn’t connecting to the printer for the 66th time that semester. Usually, I would get up, go through the seven-step manual reset, and solve the problem in 106 seconds. But I didn’t. I just looked at the student and said, ‘I don’t know why it isn’t working. The system is poorly designed. You should write an email to the IT department.’ The student looked shocked. I felt a weird mix of guilt and liberation. By refusing to be the hero, I was finally allowing the failure to be visible.

It is a difficult stance to take. Most of us are hardwired to help. We see a problem, and we want to solve it. But when we solve systemic problems with individual effort, we are actually preventing the long-term solution from ever being implemented. We are like parents who keep cleaning their teenager’s room; as long as the room eventually gets clean, the teenager has no incentive to change their behavior. The organization is the teenager, and our extra effort is the cleaning service.

Quantifying the Cost

I think about the DNA of these organizations. They are built on the assumption that there will always be a Sam N.S. or a Sarah or a Michael who will jump in at the last minute to save the project. This is not a strategy; it is a gamble. It is a gamble that relies on the infinite patience of the workforce, a resource that is currently at an all-time low. We are seeing the ‘Great Resignation’ not just because of low pay, but because people are tired of being the human glue in a world of falling apart. We want to do our jobs, not the jobs of the developers, the vendors, and the managers who failed to provide us with functioning tools.

When you put it in those terms, it becomes less about being a ‘team player’ and more about being a victim of poor planning.

Letting Go of the Cape

Tonight, I am not going to stay up until 11:06 PM fixing the export. If it hangs at 86 percent, it hangs. I will send one email to the support desk, CC my supervisor, and then I will close the lid of my laptop. I will go to bed. I will let the system fail because that is the only way it will ever get fixed. It feels like a betrayal of my own competence, a contradiction of my desire to be ‘the reliable one,’ but it is actually an act of self-preservation. We cannot keep pouring our own oil into machines that are designed to leak. It is time for the builders to take responsibility for the build, and for the heroes to hang up their capes and just be employees for a change.

We need to start tracking the cost of our ‘fixes.’ If I have to spend 46 minutes a day navigating a broken workflow, that is nearly four hours a week. In a year of 46 weeks, that is 184 hours. If my hourly rate is $36, I am essentially donating $6624 worth of my time back to the school to compensate for their cheap software choice.