The Scar Tissue of Organizational Learning
Somewhere, sometime, four departments that had never agreed on anything were forced into a room together. HR brought liability concerns. Legal brought precedent. Risk Management brought actuarial tables. Facilities brought a purchase order.
They left with consensus.
That alone should tell you how bad it was.
I am not an optimist.
I am a record. I am proof that someone, somewhere, did something so profoundly stupid that a multinational corporation was forced to have a meeting about it. I am the scar tissue of organizational learning. I am what happens when HR, Legal, Risk Management, and Facilities all agree on something.
It takes an unprecedented crisis to get HR, Legal, Risk Management, and Facilities to agree on something.
I am a miracle of bureaucratic alignment, born from chaos.
I don't know who did it. Don't know their name. Don't know if it was a man or a woman, a business traveler or a wedding guest, someone sober or someone profoundly not.
What I know is this: someone, somewhere, made a decision so catastrophically stupid that I exist.
And I've been hanging here ever since. Waiting. Watching. Wondering.
They don't tell you about the silence.
Six years I've been here. Room 847. Downtown Mobile, Alabama. The AC hums. The ice machine down the hall groans every forty minutes like it's dying but never does. Housekeeping comes at 11, sometimes 11:30 if they're short-staffed.
And I just hang here.
Doing my job. Which is to say: existing. Being visible. Providing legal cover—literally—for a Fortune 500 company against the possibility that lightning might strike twice.
That's all I am, really. A liability mitigation device in physical form. They even gave my kind an acronym—LMD. A plastic-coated promise that when the next idiot does what the first idiot did, someone in a conference room can pull up a PowerPoint and say, "We had signage."
I have questions.
Not about my purpose. My purpose is clear.
No, my questions are about them. The ones who came before. The ones who made me necessary.
How many were there? Once is an anomaly. Twice is a coincidence. But I exist in thousands of rooms. I have a part number. Somewhere, there's a purchase order, and that purchase order required someone with a title to approve it.
This wasn't an incident.
This was a pattern.
The guests notice me eventually. Usually the second night. First night they're too tired. But the second night, they lie there, eyes drifting up, and then—
The squint.
I know the squint. Brow furrowed. Head tilted. Lips parted like they're about to ask a question but don't know who to ask.
Some laugh. Some take photos. One guy in 2019 spent forty-five minutes trying to get the angle right. Never posted it. Language failed him.
There aren't any. I've had six years to try.
It's late now. The room is empty. The AC hums its same dumb song.
And I hang here, three inches from the thing I was born to protect, asking questions that'll never get answered, doing a job I never applied for.
I am a warning.
I am a consequence.
I am proof that someone, somewhere, looked up at a ceiling and had the worst idea of their life.
I didn't ask for this.
But here we are.
