Case 09 — The office file

Reviewing a sample workplace document for workslop indicators without assuming bad faith on the part of whoever wrote it

19 April 2027

Every document in this session is fictional, and every one of them is modelled on a completely ordinary piece of office writing — a status update, a one-pager, a meeting summary — because workslop’s whole trick is that it never looks extraordinary.

Before the session#

Nothing to prepare. Bring whatever patience you have left for reading plausible-sounding paragraphs that go nowhere; you’ll need it.

In the session#

Read three short fictional workplace documents and, for each, decide: does this actually advance the task, or does it just look like it does? Then write one sentence of feedback you could actually send to the (fictional) author without accusing them of anything you can’t support.

Afterwards#

The skill this session is really testing is restraint — naming a real problem with the artefact while staying scrupulously fair to the person who produced it. You’ll need both halves of that in any real workplace, this course’s casework included.