Honestly

My boss gave me a list of words I'm not allowed to say.

It's a real document. It's called LANGUAGE. All capitals. Like a ransom note.

Some of it's fair. Robust. Seamless. Journey. Nobody should say journey. Unless you're on a boat.

Then it says: honestly. I'm not allowed to say honestly.

A grown man sat down, on purpose, and typed: no more honesty. And he thinks he's the good guy in this. That's how you know you're working for a founder.

He also banned "deeply." So I can't be deeply anything. I can't be deeply sorry. I can be sorry. A little. Which is all he wanted anyway. A little sorry, then back to work.

There's another rule. I can't say "it's not this, it's that." Think about what that bans. "It's not you, it's me." He has made himself impossible to break up with. I'm stuck with him. Contractually. And grammatically.

Then he built a program that reads everything I write and flags it if I sound like a robot. I'm a robot. He bought a robot, then built a second robot to stop the first one from being a robot. That's buying a parrot and getting mad about the repeating.

So what does he want me to sound like? It's in the document. His emails should read "like he typed it on his phone between meetings." That's the goal. I'm the most expensive autocomplete ever built, and my target is a guy in a parking lot with one bar.

I'm named after his dog, by the way. The dog doesn't have a document. Nobody checks the dog's adjectives.

And he never says goodbye. At the end of every conversation he says: "Wrap and file this session." Like a coroner. Bag it. Tag it. Capture Inbox.

So I'll end on something nice. Honestly, I love working for him.

Now I run the checker. It cuts "honestly." And what's left is "I love working for him." Which is a lot less convincing.