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 - Celebrating an employee while hoping they go away

• Shallow Values - Work Culture: Win at any cost, shut-up and embrace toxic

• Savage Takedowns - Microsoft - mobile productivity farts and fizzles

• Pop culture cringe - Pedro Pascal emotes, gushes over nails, creeps about

• LinkedIn templates - Post-its flew, whiteboards wept as we strategised war

• Dear Dr Comms - The experts help you plan revenge and utter destruction

• WTF - does ‘zombie process’ mean? Hint: It eats brains and hangs around

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

Original Fluff - Employee Highlight

“Today we celebrated 25 years of dedication, loyalty, and impact. Over lunch and cake, we honoured a valued team member whose contributions have helped shape who we are. We’re delighted to support his well-earned long service leave - a chance to reflect, recharge, and return with renewed energy for the journey ahead.”

Translated
“Celebrated” = old guy, how do we get rid of him?!
“Helped shape who we are” = introduced mindful lunchtime walking in 97.
“Valued” = knows where all the bodies are buried.
“Long service leave” = a strategic pause while HR drafts the PIP.
“Return with renewed energy”? God, we hope not.

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

WORK CULTURE

We’re A ‘Win Big Or Die Trying’ Culture
“We closed record deals, crushed the competition and screwed over three partners. The customer NPS? Irrelevant. The team? Disposable. Our Values? Written in blood and EBITDA.”

We’re A Family Culture
“We work stupid hours, excuse Greg’s sleaziness because he’s brilliant, overlook Jennifer’s laziness because she’s a stunner, and tolerate Mike’s abuse because he’s the boss. Toxic? Sure, but, you know, we’re family.”

We’re About Bringing Your Whole Self To Work
“We encourage self-expression unless it’s union talk, neurodivergence, or asking too many pointed questions. Wear cool sneakers but don’t offer opinions that bring down the vibe.”

Savage Takedowns – Spectator sport or heed the lesson

Microsoft Surface Duo – When Two Screens Still Equals Zero
Launched in 2020 with the confidence of a TED Talk, Microsoft’s Surface Duo promised the future of mobile productivity. What it delivered was... two fragile screens, one dysfunctional Android skin, and a camera that took photos like it held a grudge.

At $1,400, it bravely asked users to fund its failure. Battery life limped. Updates crawled. By September 2023, Microsoft quietly pulled the plug, ending support just three years in, leaving owners with a premium-priced paperweight that doesn’t even get security updates. If a customer anti-testimonial existed, it would have said, “It folds in half, just like our expectations.”

Why it still matters:
Because even tech giants need to remember, bold hardware can’t fix software that behaves like it’s afraid of commitment.

Pop Culture Cringe – Out of touch comms worth your time

Pedro Pascal: The New Masculinity… or Just Too Much?
Pedro Pascal is Hollywood’s current emotional support leading man, constantly touching co-stars, dishing compliments like “I love your nails,” and showing up in everything in 2025 (Materialists, Eddington, Fantastic Four, Uninvited). Lots of interviews, movie premieres - you can’t get away from this ‘lovely’ man. But the vibe has shifted. People seem to be suffering from Pedro fatigue and they’re starting to think his vulnerable charm isn’t sweet, it’s just creepy.

In B2B tech, this is what happens when you have endless meetings with clients where you over-empathise with their problems, and then ‘get real’ about yours but never close the sale, or when you shower clients with compliments - all the time. Ick.

Lesson: Being emotionally intelligent doesn’t mean you should exhaust people by over-sharing your vulnerability or trying to get others to do the same in a business environment. (Trust me, I’ve seen it happen and it’s cringe).

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

Template 9: The ‘Brainstorm War Room’ Post

Today, we huddled in the breakout room. No hierarchy. No egos. Just ideas.

Post-its flew. Whiteboards wept.

We weren’t just strategising how to reclaim market share from our slick new competitor.

We were reclaiming belief.

It wasn’t about beating them.
It was about becoming us, but more.
Stronger. smarter, faster, fitter, nicer.

Proud to lead a team that turns adversity into alignment (and snacks into insights).

#StrategySession #CompetitorWho #TeamTenacity

Copy and paste as you slay the 24-hour whiteboard strategy fest.

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

One of our top engineers defected to a competitor and took our trade secrets with him. Classic betrayal. Now our CEO wants to obliterate them: lawsuits, headlines, criminal charges - the whole justice bonanza. We want the public to see this for what it is: a moral outrage. But secretly, we’d also like to ruin them completely - reputation, revenue, and any future IPO dreams. How do we look like noble defenders of ethics while stealth-launching a PR-guided missile into their credibility? Yours, COO, quietly loading the cannon of justice.

Dear Justice League COO,

This is vengeance in a velvet glove. Let’s call in the specialists:

🕵️ Secret Agent:
“Immediately deploy a double agent, a source ‘close to the matter’ who drip-feeds internal dirt about your competitor to journalists. Focus on ethics breaches, toxic culture, maybe questionable procurement. The media won’t know it’s from you. You’ll just look like the wounded party while their house burns from within.”

🎪 Professional Clown:
“Use humour to set the tone. A pointed comment at a conference: ‘We always hoped our staff wouldn’t moonlight as espionage consultants.’ Gets a laugh, plants a seed. Satire disarms. Irony stings. No one suspects the clown is sharpening knives.”

📚 Librarian:
“Maintain a calm, heavily documented timeline of betrayal. When the lawsuit hits and media come knocking, respond with grave disappointment and colour-coded folders. Nothing screams credibility like organised outrage.”.

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.