Or run an immigration dept (Hint: pull the plug)
Kafka would have loved Mondays in Ottawa — burnt coffee, flickering LEDs, absent-minded bureaucrats drifting through hallways like ghosts waiting for instructions from machines that no longer need to give them.
Kafka would stand in the doorway of some federal cubicle, cigarette smoldering, watching a mid‑level comms staffer — half replaced by automation, wholly replaced by despair — seeking a gleeful moment by preparing to drop a “bathtub crisis” into the national bloodstream.
In a government where AI writes the memos, schedules the minister, and drafts the talking points, the only thing left for a 'staffer' is to cause a stir. And nothing stirs Monday's dense ether like a metaphor that makes systemic failure sound like it's time to call the plumber.
So at 6:35 a.m., with the solemnity of a man pulling a fire alarm just to feel alive, the staffer hits “post.” A Privy Council report, they announce, warns that Canada is importing foreign criminals faster than it can deport them.
The report said, believe it or not, the system is a bathtub filling faster than officials can scoop it out. Scoop it out. A metaphor so lame Kafka would have smirked, exhaled, and muttered something about the Ministry of Water Management.
Outside the office towers in the country, a coffee‑and‑cigarette gathering begins the ritual: AI befuddled paycheques standing in the shadows of buildings run by an increasingly groping array of machinery, people will be heard discussing national decline because discussing their own obsolescence would be cutting to the bone. Inside those towers, computers hum. No one touches them. AI runs the office now.
The replies beneath the 'staffer's' post erupt exactly as expected — a sewer vent under pressure. Crimes against humanity. Demographic apocalypse. IQ theories that should have been buried with phrenology. All of it delivered with the confidence of people who believe outrage is a form of patriotism.
None of these claims appear in the report. They appear only in the replies — the digital cul‑de‑sac where nuance is kidnapped and held for ransom. But the satire isn’t in the replies. It’s in the "poster."
Picture them: a federal employee in a cubicle lit by a single flickering LED, sipping government coffee that tastes like regret. Their job used to involve reading reports, briefing ministers, maybe even shaping policy. Now they spend their days watching dashboards that update themselves, waiting for tasks that never arrive, and pretending to be busy whenever someone walks by.
They drop the bathtub metaphor into the ether because it’s the only thing they can still control. A small act of chaos. A pebble tossed into the bureaucratic void.
And it works. The country talks. The clutch outside the office talks.
The replies talk. Everyone talks — except the system itself, which continues drowning in slow motion, scooping water with spoons while the drain remains decorative.
Kafka would watch all this with a kind of gentle resignation. He’d light another cigarette, lean against the cinderblock wall, and observe the humans panicking while the machines quietly run the state. He’d say nothing. He’d just nod at the absurdity of a nation where the only thing still done manually is the outrage.
The human element started the fire. The human element keeps feeding it. And the human element — stripped of purpose, clinging to relevance — now spends Mondays posting bathtub metaphors because the machines have taken everything else.
Article suggested to CoPilot for composition, editing by Mack McColl for McColl Magazine Daily
