Silicon Valley, CA — What began as a harmless culture of performative overwork has spiraled into a full-scale metaphysical crisis, as several companies report employees are now “actively defying time itself” to appear as productive as their CEOs claim to be.
In a statement that HR described as “both horrifying and on brand,” one exhausted CEO confessed:
“We didn’t expect it to get that far. We were just trying to set an example—working 100-hour weeks, bragging about it on podcasts, maybe sleeping under a desk for optics. We never thought people would actually start trying to outwork the clock.”
How It Started: A Timeline That No Longer Makes Sense
The phenomenon reportedly began six months ago—or possibly next Tuesday, sources are unclear—when TechCorp CEO Marcus Bennington posted his now-infamous LinkedIn update: “Just wrapped a 127-hour work week. Sleep is for people without vision. #Hustle #NeverStop #TemporallyOptimized.”
Within days, middle managers across the industry began one-upping each other with increasingly impossible schedules. “I saw people claiming 180-hour work weeks,” recalled Janet Morrison, a former director of engineering who has since accepted that Thursday no longer exists for her. “I knew the math didn’t work, but I also knew my performance review was coming up.”
What started as creative accounting on timesheets quickly evolved into something far stranger. Employees began arriving at the office before they left home. Calendar invites were sent for meetings that had already concluded. One sales team reported closing deals with clients who wouldn’t be born for another three years.
“At first, we thought it was just a time zone issue,” said IT director Kevin Patel, who discovered the problem when he tried to fix a server that his logs indicated hadn’t broken yet. “Then we realized people were literally working in different time streams. Our network infrastructure wasn’t designed for temporal multiplexing.”
The breaking point came when an intern successfully completed their entire six-month internship in a single weekend by, according to their manager, “working really, really efficiently across several simultaneous Saturdays.”
The Temporal Breakdown
Internal wellness reports reveal employees are now double-booking time slots across parallel Outlook calendars, quantum clocking in, and even sending Slack messages from theoretical Tuesdays. One middle manager was reportedly hospitalized after attempting to “optimize time dilation” to finish a Q4 report before Q3 ended.
“I just wanted to impress leadership,” said the manager from their hospital bed, where doctors noted their circadian rhythm had somehow inverted itself and their body seemed to be aging backward on Wednesdays. “I figured if I could work backward through Thursday, I’d have the competitive edge for Friday’s performance review.”
The employee’s calendar now shows 47 meetings occurring simultaneously last Wednesday, all marked as “accepted.” When asked how they planned to attend all of them, they responded: “I already did. Will do? The grammar is confusing now.”
Medical staff reported that the patient kept asking for water “ten minutes ago” and insisted they’d already been discharged next week. Their emergency contact—listed as “Future Me”—could not be reached for comment.
Another software engineer, Sarah Chen, claims to have discovered a loophole in the company’s time-tracking system that allows her to log 32 hours in a single day. “I’m not even sure what day it is anymore,” she said during what her computer insists was a 3 AM standup meeting attended by seven versions of herself from different timeline branches. “But my manager gave me an ‘Exceeds Expectations’ rating, so I think I’m doing it right?”
Chen’s workspace has become something of a tourist attraction within the office. Coworkers report seeing her at her desk simultaneously eating breakfast, attending a meeting, coding, and leaving for the day. Her Slack status reads “Active” in past, present, and future tense.
“The weird part is, I’m still behind on my sprint commitments,” Chen added, before disappearing in what witnesses described as “a very corporate shimmer.”
The Tools of Temporal Manipulation
The temporal arms race has spawned an entire industry of dubious productivity tools. A startup called Chronos.io raised $40 million in Series A funding for an app that promises to “let you work yesterday’s tasks with tomorrow’s knowledge.” The app’s tutorial video is seventeen minutes long but allegedly contains forty-five minutes of content.
“We’re disrupting the tyranny of chronological time,” announced Chronos.io’s 23-year-old founder, speaking from what appeared to be three different time zones simultaneously. “Why should innovation be limited by outdated concepts like ‘sequence’ and ‘causality’?”
The app has already been downloaded 50,000 times, despite not being released for another two weeks. User reviews are mixed, with several people complaining that the free trial ended before it began, and others praising features that haven’t been developed yet.
Competing platforms have emerged with names like “TimeSplice,” “TemporalStack,” and When.ly. One app, “PastForward,” allows users to schedule tasks for the previous week and mark them as complete retroactively. Its tagline: “Why meet deadlines when you can redefine them?”
Microsoft has reportedly been working on an update to Outlook that would allow for “non-linear meeting scheduling” and has filed a patent for what it calls “Temporal Collaboration Spaces.” A leaked internal memo suggested the feature was inspired by executives who kept claiming to be “in a meeting” despite being physically observed elsewhere.
Amazon’s AWS division announced a new service: “EC2 Temporal Instances,” offering cloud computing resources that exist “slightly ahead of real-time,” allowing clients to complete processes before they start. The service crashed on launch day, though AWS insisted it was “pre-crashed” and had already been fixed in a future patch.
Leadership Responds (Eventually, or Possibly Already)
“We’re proud of the dedication,” said the company’s Chief People Officer, Rebecca Thornton, adjusting her smartwatch which displayed five conflicting time zones simultaneously, none of which corresponded to actual locations on Earth. “But we’re concerned that some staff are beginning to transcend linear existence.”
She added that the company remains “committed to work-life balance,” before checking her phone and excusing herself for a “quick call” that her calendar indicated happened yesterday. The call was with herself from tomorrow, discussing whether yesterday’s decisions were correct based on next week’s outcomes.
Thornton later sent a company-wide email titled “Re: Re: Fwd: Temporal Wellness (Sent from the Past)” which arrived in everyone’s inbox three days before it was written. The email outlined new guidelines, including a policy that employees should “try to maintain existence in a consistent timeline whenever possible, except during crunch periods.”
The CEO himself has become something of a legend, recently posting a LinkedIn humble-brag about responding to emails “from next quarter” and attending his own retirement party “preventatively.” His bio now lists his working hours as “Monday-Sunday, 12am-11:59pm, across all observable timelines.”
Bennington has doubled down on the culture he created, recently announcing at an all-hands meeting—which was somehow both mandatory and already completed—that the company’s new motto would be “Time is just another resource to optimize.” He appeared via hologram, which he claimed was broadcasting from “next fiscal year’s Q2 earnings call.”
“I’ve been thinking about this moment for the past six months,” Bennington said to the assembled employees, before correcting himself: “Or I will have been thinking about it. English isn’t really equipped for where we’re going as a company.”
When pressed about the health concerns, Bennington insisted that “discomfort is just growth,” before vanishing mid-sentence, leaving behind only a sticky note that read “BRB—stuck in a time loop, back in 5 (or was it 5 hours ago?).”
Corporate Solutions and Controlled Chaos
Several firms have begun installing Time Management Compliance Software that alerts HR if an employee’s timestamps indicate temporal violations. The software, developed by a startup whose founders claim they “haven’t slept since 2019, literally, because they’ve been working in a temporally-extended Tuesday,” uses AI to detect anomalies in employee productivity patterns.
The system monitors for red flags such as: logging in before your shift starts in multiple time zones, attending meetings before they’re scheduled, completing tasks that haven’t been assigned yet, or existing in two places simultaneously (unless approved by management).
Early results show a 15% decrease in time-warping incidents, but productivity remains paradoxically higher—leading executives to quietly encourage “controlled anomalies.” One director admitted they now have unofficial “flex timeline” policies, where high-performers are allowed limited temporal manipulation as a perk.
“We’ve designated certain conference rooms as ‘Flex Time Zones,’” explained Marcus Wade, director of operations, showing off a room labeled “Conference Room B (All Times).” “Employees can book them to work in accelerated time, as long as they don’t cause any reality fragmentation that affects the stock price.”
The rooms come with warning labels: “May contain non-linear causality,” “Objects in mirror are from alternate timeline,” and “Please do not interact with past selves—HR violation.”
One such room has been permanently sealed after a team attempted a 72-hour sprint in what they believed was “subjective time” but turned out to be an actual localized time vortex. The team completed their product launch, but emerged to find their children had graduated college, their project was already obsolete, and the company had been acquired by a competitor that wouldn’t exist for another decade.
“We finished the sprint though,” said team lead David Rodriguez, now significantly grayer and deeply confused about his age. “Leadership says that’s what matters. They gave us a Pizza Friday as a reward. Or they will. The pizza tasted great yesterday.”
The sealed room occasionally emits sounds of keyboard typing and the faint glow of monitor screens, though facilities management insists the room has been empty for three years and won’t be built until next month.
The Competitive Landscape
Competitors are watching closely. Tech rival InnovateCorp’s CEO Amanda Zhang announced they’re “not concerned” about the temporal arms race, then immediately contradicted herself by unveiling a new policy allowing employees to “bank unused future time for later productivity.”
“If you don’t use your full 24 hours today, those hours roll over into tomorrow,” Zhang explained at a press conference that journalists swear took place simultaneously in three different cities. “It’s basically a time savings account. Some of our top performers have accumulated weeks of banked time, which they’re using to attend meetings that haven’t been scheduled yet.”
When asked if this made any sense, Zhang replied: “Does anything make sense anymore? We’re just trying to stay competitive.”
InnovateCorp has also introduced “Temporal Performance Bonuses,” where employees receive extra compensation for productivity that occurs in multiple time streams. The bonus structure is so complex that the finance department hired a theoretical physicist to calculate payroll, but she quit after three days, claiming the accounting “violated several fundamental laws of the universe.”
Meanwhile, legacy tech company MegaSoft announced they were “staying grounded in traditional values” and would not be participating in temporal manipulation. The announcement was made via a press release that was somehow sent before the decision to send it was made, undermining their entire position.
Start-ups are rushing to join the trend. One young company, TimeKrusher, proudly advertised that their entire staff “works in a constant state of tomorrow.” Their Series A pitch deck included the line: “We don’t just move fast and break things—we break spacetime.” They received funding before the pitch meeting occurred.
Tech recruiters report fielding increasingly surreal questions from job candidates, including “Does your unlimited PTO policy include temporal dimensions?”, “If I work through a time loop, do I get paid for each iteration?”, and “What’s your policy on temporal clones—do they count as separate employees for benefits purposes?”
One recruiter, speaking on condition of anonymity, admitted: “I had a candidate interview so well that I offered them the job before they applied. They turned it down because they’d already accepted a position at a company that won’t be founded until 2027. The job market is insane right now.”
A prominent venture capitalist tweeted: “Disrupting spacetime is exactly the kind of innovative thinking we fund. Time is just another inefficiency to optimize away. The future of work isn’t 9-to-5, it’s all-times-simultaneously.” The tweet was somehow posted three days before the VC firm’s founding date.
The same investor followed up with: “Just led a $50M Series B in a company working on making deadlines illegal. Why should human accomplishment be constrained by temporal sequence? That’s dinosaur thinking.” This tweet has yet to be posted but has already received 10,000 likes.
Expert Analysis and Growing Concern
Philosophers have entered the debate, calling this “the first documented case of capitalism bending spacetime.” A Stanford ethicist summarized the dilemma succinctly:
“When your job performance depends on proving you suffer harder than your boss, time stops being a construct—it becomes a KPI.”
Dr. Helena Marks, a temporal physicist inadvertently consulting for several tech companies, expressed alarm: “They keep asking me to ‘make deadlines more flexible’ and ‘optimize the space-time continuum for maximum throughput.’ I tried to explain that’s not how physics works, but they just scheduled me for a meeting that occurs before I was born.”
Dr. Marks has since published a paper titled “Corporate Chronology Collapse: How Hustle Culture Created a Temporal Paradox,” but admitted she’s not sure when she wrote it. “I found it on my desk with yesterday’s date, but I don’t remember writing it. However, I did receive several citations for it next month, so I must have done a good job.”
The paper has sparked debate in scientific communities, with physicists warning that if the trend continues, we could see “localized temporal anomalies spreading beyond corporate campuses.” Some worry about a cascading effect where the obsession with productivity creates “time pockets” where normal causality breaks down.
“The fabric of spacetime is surprisingly resilient,” explained Dr. James Wu, a quantum mechanics specialist. “But it wasn’t designed to handle middle managers trying to attend seventeen meetings simultaneously across four different timezones that don’t exist. We’re seeing stress fractures in reality itself.”
Dr. Wu pointed to his data showing unusual readings near major tech campuses—temporal fluctuations, causality loops, and what he describes as “pockets of pure deadline panic that have achieved a kind of semi-physical form.”
A workplace psychologist, Dr. Michelle Santos, noted the troubling trend of employees developing “Productivity Dysmorphia,” where they can no longer perceive time accurately and believe they’re always behind schedule, even when existing in multiple time periods simultaneously.
“I’ve had patients tell me they feel guilty for not working during hours that haven’t happened yet,” Dr. Santos said from her office, decorated with seven clocks all showing different contradictory times. “One client broke down crying because they ‘wasted’ time sleeping, which they had done three days from now. The temporal confusion is causing severe anxiety.”
She added that traditional therapeutic approaches are failing. “I can’t tell patients to ‘live in the moment’ when the moment might be last Tuesday or possibly next Friday. Mindfulness exercises don’t work when patients are simultaneously mindful in multiple timelines.”
Dr. Santos has observed physical symptoms too: premature aging in some cases, reverse aging in others, and several patients who seem to be aging in different directions simultaneously, depending on which timeline they’re primarily working in.
“One executive came to me concerned that he was younger on Mondays than Fridays, which was interfering with his weekend plans,” she recounted. “I had to refer him to a physician who specializes in non-linear biology, which apparently is now a medical specialty.”
Employee Testimonials: Voices from Across Time
“I sent an email to myself in the past warning myself not to accept this job,” said Thomas Park, a burned-out product manager whose business card lists his title as “Senior Product Manager (Temporal).” “But past-me thought it was spam and deleted it. Now I’m stuck in a causality loop of regret.”
Park explained that he now exists in a state of “permanent retrospective disappointment,” where he’s simultaneously experiencing the regret of decisions he hasn’t made yet while making decisions he’s already regretted.
“Last week—or maybe next week—I had a one-on-one with my manager about my career progression,” Park continued. “But I’d already had that meeting in three different timelines, each with different outcomes. In one, I got promoted. In another, I was fired. In the third, the meeting never happened because both of us were attending different versions of the same meeting elsewhere. HR said all three outcomes were valid and I should ‘navigate the ambiguity.’”
Another employee, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of disappointing their “future self’s” quarterly review, described setting their alarm for “yesterday morning” to get a head start on deliverables.
“The worst part,” they added, “is that my manager’s Slack status is always ‘In a meeting’ across all possible timelines, so I can never actually talk to anyone about this. I tried scheduling a one-on-one, but the calendar said he was already meeting with me, is currently meeting with me, and will meet with me, all at the same time. I’m not sure which one is the real me.”
A junior analyst named Priya Chandran shared that she’d stopped trying to use her PTO days because “time off doesn’t make sense anymore.” She explained: “I requested a vacation day for last Friday, but I’d already attended three meetings that day in the future, so HR said it would create a temporal paradox and denied my request. They suggested I take the day off ‘retrospectively’ instead, which apparently means I pretend I wasn’t at work even though I definitely was.”
Chandran’s situation worsened when she tried to call in sick. “I called in sick on Tuesday, but my manager said I’d already been at work that day in another timeline, so it counted as an unexcused absence. I was penalized for missing a day I hadn’t actually experienced yet. The attendance policy wasn’t written to handle this.”
She now keeps a journal trying to track which version of herself is doing what, when. The journal contains entries like: “Monday (Past): Met with Jake about Q3 projections. Monday (Present): Currently meeting with Jake about Q4. Monday (Future): Will meet with Jake about Q5 unless that meeting already happened, in which case I’m confused about which Monday this is.”
Customer service representative Mike Torres shared an even more disorienting experience: “I was answering a customer complaint about a product defect. But the complaint came from next month, about a product we haven’t shipped yet. My manager told me to log it as ‘resolved’ since we’d obviously fix it before we shipped it, but then the customer left a bad review yesterday about how we ignored their future complaint. My quality metrics are completely upside down.”
Torres added that he’s now afraid to answer calls because he’s not sure whether he’s dealing with past grievances, current issues, or problems that haven’t occurred yet. “Last week I resolved a ticket that was opened tomorrow. The customer thanked me before they contacted us. My brain hurts.”
Engineering team lead Robert Kim described a code review that “occurred across three separate Thursdays” and involved him reviewing his own code that he hadn’t written yet. “I found bugs in code I was going to write next sprint. I fixed them before I wrote them. When I finally got around to writing the code, I remembered I’d already fixed the bugs, so I tried to write it correctly, but that created different bugs that I’d never reviewed. The deployment went live last Tuesday and will crash tomorrow, which I think means it’s currently crashing. DevOps is furious with me across all timelines.”
The Human Cost
The temporal manipulation trend has had devastating effects on employees’ personal lives. Relationships have collapsed under the strain of partners existing in different time streams.
“My wife and I barely see each other anymore—and I mean that literally,” explained Andrew Morrison, a senior developer. “She works for a competing company that’s on a different temporal optimization schedule. When it’s Tuesday for me, it’s Thursday for her. We tried to schedule a date night, but by the time Saturday arrived for me, she’d already experienced Sunday and was back to Monday. We gave up and now just send each other messages into the void, hoping they arrive at the right time.”
Morrison’s daughter, age seven—or possibly nine, depending on which timeline you ask—no longer understands why her father is sometimes at her birthday party and sometimes not. “She had four birthday parties this year,” Morrison said sadly. “I managed to attend two of them, miss one, and I’m currently at the fourth one right now even though we’re having this conversation. Being a parent across multiple timelines is… it’s impossible.”
Children of temporally displaced workers have begun showing their own signs of stress. Schools report students turning in homework before it’s assigned, aging inconsistently, or claiming their parents exist “in a quantum state” and can’t help with their math problems because “Dad is stuck between yesterday and tomorrow.”
One teacher, Ms. Patricia Huang, described trying to hold a parent-teacher conference where the parent appeared via video chat from what they insisted was “last semester.” “The mother was concerned about grades her son was going to get next quarter. I tried to explain that I couldn’t discuss performance that hadn’t happened yet, but she showed me his report card from the future. He got a B+. She wanted to know how we could improve it now. I told her if it already happened in the future, it’s too late to change it, but she said that doesn’t make sense because the future hasn’t happened yet. We were both crying by the end.”
Marriages are ending in bizarre temporal custody battles. One divorce filing included the phrase: “Petitioner seeks custody of the children during even-numbered timelines, with Respondent receiving odd-numbered timelines and alternating temporal paradoxes.”
Regulatory Response (Or Lack Thereof)
The Department of Labor has announced an investigation into potential labor law violations, though officials admit they’re “not entirely sure which laws apply to temporal manipulation” and whether overtime rules account for “working across multiple simultaneous time streams.”
“We’re in uncharted territory,” admitted DOL spokesperson Jennifer Cruz at a press conference. “The Fair Labor Standards Act doesn’t have provisions for employees who work 200 hours in a week that only contained 168 hours. We’re consulting with OSHA about workplace safety standards for temporal anomalies, but their guidelines assume a universe where cause precedes effect.”
OSHA has proposed new workplace safety standards that include warnings like: “Caution: Temporal Rift,” “No More Than 1 Version of Yourself in This Area,” and “Wearing Required: Temporal Protection Equipment.” However, the agency admits enforcement will be “challenging” since inspectors keep arriving at facilities either too early or too late, and sometimes before the workplace exists.
Meanwhile, the IRS has declared that all temporal manipulation income must be reported in the year it was earned, or will be earned, or might have been earned, creating what one accountant described as “an absolute nightmare.” Several companies have received tax bills for future earnings they haven’t made yet, while others are being audited for past earnings that occurred in alternate timelines.
“We’re trying to collect taxes on income that exists in a superposition of earned and unearned,” explained an exasperated IRS auditor. “One CEO paid himself a bonus yesterday that he’ll earn next year by completing work he did last month. Where do I even start with that?”
State regulators are equally baffled. California’s Employment Development Department sent one company a notice of violation for “allowing unsafe temporal working conditions,” but the notice was dated three months before the law prohibiting such conditions was passed.
Senator Elizabeth Warren tweeted: “Big Tech has gone too far. No one should have to work in multiple timelines just to keep their job. We need common-sense temporal labor protections NOW.” The tweet received mixed responses, with several people pointing out that she’d posted the same sentiment next week with slightly different wording.
A congressional hearing has been scheduled to investigate the phenomenon, though the date keeps changing. The hearing is currently set for last Thursday, moved to next Monday, or possibly never, depending on which version of the congressional calendar you consult.
Corporate Wellness Initiatives (That Are Doomed)
Corporate wellness programs have attempted to intervene, offering mindfulness seminars with titles like “Being Present When Present Doesn’t Exist,” “Meditation for Timeless Professionals,” and “Finding Your Center Across Multiple Temporal Planes.” Attendance has been mandatory and somehow retroactive.
One wellness coordinator, Lisa Chang, admitted the programs aren’t working: “We hosted a yoga session focused on ‘returning to the now,’ but half the attendees showed up next week, and the other half claimed they’d already been there tomorrow. The instructor had an existential crisis when she realized she was teaching the class, had already taught the class, and was going to teach the class, all simultaneously. She quit via email that arrived before she was hired.”
The company has also introduced “Temporal Wellness Days,” where employees are encouraged to “experience time normally for 24 hours.” However, participation rates remain low, with one employee explaining: “If I take a day to exist in regular time, I’ll fall behind everyone else who’s quantum-multitasking, and I’ll never catch up. Plus, my manager would know. He’d see it in my calendar that I only existed in one timeline for a full day. That’s basically announcing you’re not a team player.”
Some companies have tried offering free therapy sessions, but therapists are increasingly refusing to work with tech employees. “I can’t help people process trauma that hasn’t happened yet or is currently happening in multiple timelines,” explained Dr. Robert Kim, a clinical psychologist who recently stopped accepting clients from temporal manipulation companies. “One patient described being fired, promoted, and given a lateral move in three separate timelines, all branching from the same performance review. How do I help someone process that? What do I even write in my notes?”
Gym memberships have been offered as wellness perks, but fitness instructors report that some employees are completing full workout routines “across multiple temporal instances” to save time, arriving at the gym already sweaty from exercises they’re about to do.
“One guy claims he did leg day yesterday, even though he’s doing it right now, and has already scheduled the same workout for tomorrow,” reported one confused personal trainer. “His muscles exist in different states of fatigue depending on which timeline you observe him in. I have no idea how to design a workout plan for that.”
The International Perspective
The phenomenon hasn’t been limited to Silicon Valley. Reports of temporal manipulation are emerging from tech hubs worldwide, each with their own cultural spin on the crisis.
In Tokyo, several companies have reported employees achieving “karoshi across multiple timelines”—literally working themselves to death in several time streams simultaneously. The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare has issued warnings, though they arrived too late to prevent tragedies that had already occurred in the future.
Bangalore’s tech sector has seen engineers discovering that working in Indian Standard Time while mentally existing in Pacific Standard Time creates what they call “temporal lag,” leading to productivity that occurs “approximately 12.5 hours out of phase with reality.”
London’s financial district reports traders attempting to manipulate markets by placing trades before prices change, leading to what economists are calling “temporal insider trading” and “paradox arbitrage.” The Financial Conduct Authority has opened investigations into several hedge funds whose returns are “statistically impossible unless they had knowledge of future market movements, which they apparently do.”
Berlin’s startup scene has embraced the trend with characteristic enthusiasm, with several companies marketing themselves as “Timeline Agnostic” and offering positions for “Temporal Flexibility Specialists.” One job posting seeks “a developer who can code in multiple timelines simultaneously—experience with quantum entanglement a plus.”
Meanwhile, in Beijing, the government has banned temporal manipulation in workplaces, calling it “a capitalist perversion of space and time that undermines the natural order.” The ban has been largely ignored by tech companies, who continue to operate in what officials describe as “temporally non-compliant states.”
Where We Go From Here
Meanwhile, the CEO who started it all reportedly refused to comment, claiming he was “too busy working in the future.” His assistant later clarified that he was, in fact, in a meeting about past-tense deliverables scheduled for tomorrow, and would “get back to us yesterday if bandwidth permits.”
When finally cornered by a reporter in an elevator, Bennington offered only this: “Look, we’re optimizers. It’s what we do. We optimized supply chains, we optimized marketing funnels, we optimized human resource allocation. Time was the last inefficiency. So we’re optimizing time. Is it causing some disruption? Sure. But that’s how progress works. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, or in this case, without breaking the fundamental structure of causality.”
The elevator doors closed before the reporter could ask a follow-up question, but they swear they heard Bennington say, “Besides, we already had this conversation yesterday, and you agreed with me,” even though this was definitively their first encounter.
At press time, TechCorp’s stock had risen 40%, prompting the board to officially declare the temporal crisis “a culture win” and roll out the program company-wide. Several board members attending the decision meeting noted they’d already seen the stock rise before the meeting occurred, which they took as validation of the decision they were currently making.
The company’s official statement read: “TechCorp remains committed to innovation, disruption, and pushing boundaries—including the boundaries of conventional spacetime. Our temporal optimization program has been a tremendous success, and we’re excited to expand it to all divisions, all regions, and all possible timelines. The future of work is here. Also tomorrow. And yesterday.”
HR has scheduled a mandatory all-hands meeting about the new policy. It already happened last month, but attendance is required next week. Employees who miss it will be written up in the past.
When asked if there were any plans to address the health concerns, temporal violations, or existential crises plaguing the workforce, a company spokesperson replied: “We’ve heard the feedback and take it seriously. We’re planning to address these concerns at next quarter’s town hall. Which we already held. But also haven’t scheduled yet. Thank you for your patience across all timelines.”
As of publication, seventeen employees have voluntarily checked themselves into facilities specializing in “temporal trauma,” three have been involuntarily committed to institutions for claiming they’re from alternate timeline branches, and one has reportedly achieved what doctors describe as “complete temporal dissociation”—existing in all times simultaneously and therefore essentially none at all. They remain on the company’s active payroll and their Slack status still shows “active.”
The tech industry watches, waits, and works—past, present, and future collapsing into a single, endless, profitable moment of hustle.
Editor’s note: This article was submitted yesterday, is currently being written, and will be published last week. We apologize for any temporal confusion. If you’re reading this before we wrote it, please send corrections to the past.