The Standard Is to Have No Standards
By nine fourteen on Monday morning, Luna Valerose had already fixed three things that were not technically her responsibility. The first had been a report that refused to refresh because Thomas had saved it into the wrong folder. The second was a workflow that had allegedly stopped working overnight, which turned out to mean that somebody had changed a source filename on Friday afternoon without telling anyone.
The third was standing beside her desk.
“Luna?”
She kept typing. “Mm?”
“Do you have a second?”
“No.”
Mark waited while she finished the sentence in her change note, corrected a typo and read it once more. When she finally looked up, he was holding his laptop against his chest with the patience of a man who had already decided where his problem belonged.
“You’re still here.”
“You said no.”
“I did.”
“I thought you meant no in the way people mean yes.”
“That seems dangerous.”
He grinned and turned the laptop towards her. “I can’t open the review view.”
Luna leaned forward far enough to read the address bar. The error message occupied most of the page; above it, in considerably smaller letters, was the actual explanation. “Which environment are you in?”
“The normal one.”
“There is no environment called normal.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I really don’t.”
He pointed at the browser tab. “This one.”
“You’re in test.”
“I’m not. I clicked production.”
“You clicked the production bookmark. The bookmark points to test.”
Mark lowered the laptop slightly. “Why?”
“Because someone updated the links last month and somehow managed to reverse them.”
“Who?”
“No idea.”
“And nobody fixed it?”
“I reported it.”
“What happened?”
Luna turned back to her monitor. “Nothing.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s the full lifecycle.”
He laughed, then stopped when she reached for her keyboard. “You’re joking.”
“No. If you want production, remove slash-test from the URL.”
He did. The page loaded immediately, leaving him with the expression of someone personally betrayed by a bookmark.
“That’s insane.”
“Yes.”
“Why are we like this?”
“Our standard is to have no standards,” Petra said from the opposite desk, without looking up.
Mark nodded solemnly. “Right. Forgot.”
“That,” Luna said, “is because the standard is undocumented.”
Petra snorted. Mark retreated with his functioning laptop, muttering something about quitting and opening a bakery.
“You’d burn the bakery down,” Petra called after him.
“I’d automate it first.”
“That would make the fire faster.”
Luna smiled and returned to her change note. Around her, the team was settling into the uneven rhythm of a Monday morning. Keyboards clicked beneath the murmur of calls. Two rows over, someone addressed a supplier in the unnaturally patient voice people used when every less offensive option had failed. Near the printer, two colleagues were debating whether a ticket had been incorrectly assigned or merely spiritually abandoned. The printer contributed a mechanical cough that sounded terminal.
Their team was technically mixed-function. In practice, nobody had ever been entirely sure where one responsibility ended and another began, so everyone had developed territorial maps that contradicted everyone else’s. Luna knew most of those maps by heart. She also knew which ones were fictional.
People had long since stopped asking whether a problem belonged to her before bringing it over. They arrived with laptops, screenshots and, occasionally, expressions usually associated with medical emergencies. She resented the interruptions. She also knew that once she had seen something she could fix, pretending she had not seen it required more effort than helping.
“Luna?”
She closed her eyes.
Petra peered over her monitor. “You manifested that.”
“I know.”
This time it was Anna, one of the newer colleagues, hovering two desks away. She approached only after Luna turned towards her.
“What happened?”
“I think I broke something.”
“Did you delete production data?”
“No.”
“Then statistically we can recover.”
Anna’s nervous smile lasted just long enough for her to explain. “I was updating the monthly file, and now the numbers don’t match yesterday’s version.”
“Send me the link.”
“I can show you—”
“Link first.”
The Teams notification appeared almost immediately. Luna opened the file, followed the totals back to the source tab and clicked through the affected cells. A perfectly plausible number sat where a formula should have been.
“Did you paste values into column H?”
Anna went pale. “I… maybe?”
“That means yes.”
“I thought that was the column I was supposed to update.”
“It is.” Luna watched relief arrive on Anna’s face and regretted the necessary second half. “Unfortunately, the formula was also in that column.”
“Oh.”
“It’s fine. The previous version exists.”
“You can recover it?”
“Yes.” She was already opening the version history.
Anna released a breath. “Thank God.”
“Thank SharePoint.”
“That feels less emotionally satisfying.”
“Still more reliable.”
A soft laugh reached them from three desks away. Luna glanced towards it. Rosalie sat angled towards Peter, one elbow resting on the partition while he showed her something on his monitor. She laughed again, higher and softer this time, her attention fixed on him.
Across the desk, Petra lifted an eyebrow. Luna answered with a small shrug and returned to the spreadsheet. There was nothing new to investigate. Rosalie had joined four months earlier and somehow managed to be overwhelmed whenever a woman asked her to complete something, yet astonishingly resourceful whenever one of the men needed help.
On Friday afternoon Petra had asked for a dataset. Rosalie had been absolutely drowning, but had promised it first thing Monday. At eight thirty-two this morning, Peter had mentioned a comparison table. By eight forty-seven, she had made him two versions.
Petra’s dataset had not materialized.
“This is actually perfect,” Peter was saying.
“I wasn’t sure which format you’d like,” Rosalie replied, “so I just did both.”
“That must have taken ages.”
“Oh, it was nothing.”
Petra’s fingers stopped above her keyboard. Luna opened their Teams chat before the thought could become a sentence spoken aloud.
Luna: Don’t.
Petra: I haven’t done anything.
Luna: Your face has.
Petra: My face has freedom of expression.
Luna: Your face is about to get us both called into a meeting.
Petra looked across at her. Luna gave her the unhelpful appearance of someone entirely occupied with restoring a formula.
Petra: Still waiting for my file btw.
Luna: I know.
Petra: Of course you know.
Luna: You complained about it for twelve minutes on Friday.
Petra: It was an important twelve minutes.
Luna suppressed a smile, too late to escape Anna’s worried attention.
“Is it bad?”
“What?”
“The file.”
“No. Petra is threatening workplace violence.”
“Oh.” Anna accepted that without further explanation, which probably said something about the team.
Luna restored the missing formula, copied across Anna’s legitimate updates and checked the totals before sending the link back. “Done.”
“That fast?”
“You only broke one thing.”
“That sounds almost like praise.”
“Don’t get used to it.”
Anna returned to her desk smiling. Luna checked the time: nine twenty-eight. She still had two outstanding requests, a change note to finish and an automation she had wanted to test before lunch. There was also a meeting at ten. None of this altered the most pressing fact of the morning, which was that she had no tea.
She saved her work.
“Where are you going?” Petra asked.
“Tea.”
“Bring me coffee?”
“No.”
“Rude.”
“You’re closer to the kitchen than I am.”
“But you’re already standing.”
“I haven’t stood yet.”
Luna pushed back her chair. Petra pointed at her with immediate satisfaction.
“Now you have.”
“That sounds like a you problem.”
“Luna.”
“No.”
She escaped before another request could physically attach itself to her.
The kitchen was at the far end of the floor, beyond two meeting rooms, the copy area and an access-controlled corridor that had become less convenient after a renovation intended to improve it. Luna had stopped questioning the arrangement. There were limits to how many organizational mysteries one person could emotionally adopt.
She rounded the corner and nearly walked into a man stationed directly in front of the access gate.
He was tall enough to block most of the reader from view, with broad shoulders and silver-white hair that caught the overhead light when he bent his head. At present, all his attention was directed towards a plastic badge. He tapped it against the reader. Red. Turned it over and tried again. Still red.
Luna stopped a few steps behind him. He noticed her before making a third attempt.
“Does this thing normally work?” His voice was calm, but only technically.
“Yes.”
He glanced at the reader. “It disagrees.”
“You’re using the wrong side.”
“I’ve tried both sides.”
“No. You’ve tried front and back.”
He considered her for a moment. “That is usually what both sides means.”
“The chip is on the lower edge. Hold it flat instead of tapping it.”
He looked down at the badge again, then followed her instructions. The light turned green and the gate clicked open. His expression suggested that success had done nothing to improve his opinion of the equipment.
“That is terrible design.”
“Yes.”
“Why would orientation matter that much?”
“Because whoever configured it hated people.”
The corner of his mouth moved. “Is that the official explanation?”
“No. The official explanation is probably forty pages and less accurate.”
