THE STATIC

Hey You, Welcome! Here’s your weekly dose roasting tech spin, bluster and puffery. Laugh at the cringe, unjam your message.

This week in:

• Tech Waffle Torture - Company Values: Corporate cosplay for ethics

• Shallow Values - Radical Candour: If honesty hurts, eat concrete

• Savage Takedowns - Meta Reality Labs: bold vision or epic faceplant?

• Pop Culture Cringe - Queen of the UFC turns into a sore loser

• LinkedIn Templates - Celebrating Go-live between clenched teeth

• Dear Dr Comms - The experts wade in on how to avoid lawsuits after a wild customer event

• WTF does ‘rubber duck debugging’ mean? Quack, quack, find out

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Tech Waffle Torture Explained - We tell you what corporate speak really means. You’re welcome.

Original Fluff - Company Values

Our Values define who we are and how we operate globally. They are:

• Innovation: We lead with new ideas that drive progress

• Collaboration: We work together for meaningful change

• Integrity: We do what is right, not just what is profitable

• Excellence: We aim for excellence in all we do

• Commitment: We do what we say we will do

• Diversity & Inclusion: Diverse perspectives create better solutions

Translated:

• Innovation = Charge clients $250K to brainstorm, plus $250K for a ‘strategic’ report telling them to spend $3M on ERP NebulaPrime10X - a fancy term for ERP in the cloud.

• Collaboration = daily game plan sessions with our most ruthless Strategic Account Managers to plot price hikes and push unneeded tech.

• Integrity = Follow the letter of the law so we don’t get caught; everything else is unofficially fine.

• Excellence = Printed on every brochure; absent from most deliverables.

• Commitment = Expect clients to commit for life; our commitment to their goals expires quarterly.

• Diversity & Inclusion = Win awards by hiring ten culturally diverse but wildly unqualified managers on probation.

Meaningfully Shallow Values – You get them as short and sweet ugly truths

RADICAL CANDOUR

Fearless Feedback
“The founder called the Sales Director a ‘no-good piece of shit’ in front of the team.
It’s not bullying, it’s just brutal clarity, and it shows we care deeply about Q4.”

Unfiltered Honesty
“I told her she needed more executive presence. She asked what that meant. I said ‘Just… less of whatever you’re doing now.’ She cried. Let’s hope she gets it”.

Truth Grenade
CEO performance review of Business Unit GM: “Revenue’s tanking, staff are fleeing and you’re still here. Curious.”

Savage Takedowns – Spectator sport or heed the lesson

Meta / Reality Labs – The Metaverse Mirage Strikes Again
Meta’s metaverse dream has become a bottomless cash pit. In Q2 2025 alone, Reality Labs lost a staggering $4.53 billion, earning only $370 million in sales - proof that even billionaire-scale ideas can't paper over the fact that no one’s buying the fantasy. Since 2020, the division has drained well past $50 billion and counting. Meanwhile, layoffs are looming and the COO just left as the division is quietly being folded back into Meta proper. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg is doubling down on his AI obsession with plans for moon-sized data centres, because if your dream dies, at least you can phoenix-rise it with AI.

Why it matters:
Meta can bankroll metaverse-sized losses thanks to its ad-fuelled cash machine, but most tech companies can’t burn $50 billion chasing a maybe. For everyone else, the lesson is starker: moonshot bets without traction can sink you. Even for Meta, the open question remains - is this visionary patience or expensive hubris? And communication matters here too: the bigger the gamble, the stronger and clearer the narrative must be, or your ‘bold vision’ just looks like waste.

Pop Culture Cringe – Out of touch comms worth your time

Ronda Rousey: From Invincible To Invisible
Once hailed as the queen of MMA, Ronda Rousey steamrolled her way to 12 straight UFC wins and six title defences with the swagger of a gladiator in a Marvel origin story. She thought she was unbeatable, and invincible, saying, “I’m still undefeated because being defeated is a choice,” before eventually being knocked out, twice, into career oblivion. No humility. No accountability. After her second loss, she refused to be interviewed and slunk away, ghosting fans and was then booed into WWE like an expired meme.

In B2B tech, this is what happens when a once-dominant company believes its own hype. Hi, Nokia. Undefeated until Android. Then came silence, irrelevance, and the desperate pivot to something no one wanted.

Lesson: Arrogance kills your ability to evolve, learn, and stay vigilant - so you either don’t adapt, or you adapt after it no longer matters.

LinkedIn Popularity Templates – Syrupy, self-congratulatory. Surprisingly effective.

Template 9: The ‘We made it (barely)’ Drinks Post

Last night’s drinks weren’t just celebratory, they were sacred.

After months of grinding through a complex ERP implementation (the kind with 473 workflows and zero hugs), we raised a glass not to perfection… but to survival.

💙 To the team who carried the weight. 💙

💙 To late nights, blank stares, and customers that gaslit us daily. 💙

💙 To grit, gristle, and sheer willpower lodged between our clenched teeth. 💙

We didn’t just go live. We lived.

#ERPWarriors #NoScopeLeftBehind #ChampagneAndScarTissue

Copy and paste to your LinkedIn company page, ideally with photos of happy customers and none of the carnage behind them.

Got some naval gazing or philosophical musing you’d like to turn into a syrupy LinkedIn post? Reply to this email with your request and I’ll do my best.

Dear Dr Comms – When spin fails, we call in the real professionals to fix our stuff-ups

Dear Dr Comms

We hosted a customer appreciation event on a boat, which sounds classy, but by midnight it had devolved into a cautionary tale. After docking, most guests (and staff) continued to a city club. Some highlights: one of our juniors sold cocaine (arrested), another vomited on a customer, and our Customer Success Manager was very publicly successful with a senior client exec. Needless to say, we are now deeply unpopular with Legal, HR, and potentially the customer’s spouse. How do we recover from this? And more importantly, how do we do it without banning all future fun? Yours, CMO, still finding glitter and regret.

Dear ‘All that glitters isn’t gold’ CMO,

Ah yes, the rare event that checks all the corporate misconduct boxes. Let’s triage:

📊 Accountant:
“Reconcile the damage. Who’s at risk legally? Who do you need to retain commercially? Write off what you must (including certain careers), and quietly settle the rest. This isn’t a write-up, it’s a write-down.”

🐎 Horse Whisperer:
“Don’t panic. Start whispering. Speak to the client privately - acknowledge what happened without blaming anyone. Let them feel heard and respected, sealed with a discreet handshake that just happens to include a gift of money. Then reassure them that next time, we’ll party with paddock rules: fences up, gates locked, and no one galloping off unsupervised.”

🧠 Brain Surgeon:
“Precision matters now. Cut out the rot (yes, including the coke-dealing junior), but don’t lobotomise your culture. Fun isn’t the problem, lack of boundaries is. Rebuild your social settings with surgical care and very clear consequences.”

Got a problem you wouldn’t trust the Comms Dr to fix? Reply to this email, I’ll loop in real experts. 

What The Fluff (WTF)?! – Decoding tech, something that linguists, philosophers, and your boss refuse to do

Layer 8 Insights – Regular deep dives that explore the human error in tech.