Catch-90: Fireflies in the Corporate Flame

“What do you do sitting at home? How long can you stare at your wife? How long can the wives stare at their husbands? Come on, get to the office and start working.” —A recent Loud & Thoughtless statement advocating 90 hours workweek and working Sundays

Early on this Sunday afternoon, as I sat gazing at my homemaker in the cozy confines of our living room, I couldn’t help but think of Joseph Heller and his masterpiece on the absurdities of bureaucratic logic and corporate greed, Catch-22. With an acute awareness of my own culpability for numerous sins, my thoughts turned to Catch-90—the relentless paradox that countless corporate workers find themselves trapped in today.

There is another catch then, and that is Catch-90, which specifies that a concern for one’s mental and physical health, or a desire to stare at your wife instead of adhering to 90-hour workweeks, is considered a betrayal of the organization and an unwillingness to contribute to nation-building. However, if you agree to work 90 hours or more, you prove your commitment to the cause —but only until you collapse from exhaustion and your family disintegrates due to neglect. At that point, you will become useless and inefficient, thereby betraying the organization and will be deemed unwilling to build the nation.

The workers can speak up about the absurdity of working such hours, but the moment they do, they would prove themselves unfit for the patriotic duty and become eligible for elimination. And if they quit, they will be the traitors to the national cause. If they adhere to work weeks of 90 hours or more, they will be heroes committing hara-kiri in slow motion. They are, therefore, nothing more than fireflies, destined to burn in the corporate flame.

The brilliance of Catch-90 is that it ensnares the employees in a feedback loop:

If you work 90 hours or more, you’ll burn out and fail the corporation and hence the nation.

If you work less than the 90 hours, you’re clearly lazy and undeserving of your position.

And if you dare to mutter even the faintest protest that life outside work matters, you’re just someone who stares at your spouse too much.

This profound leadership oracle deserves its own place in the pantheon of corporate absurdities. It’s the kind of rhetorical flourish that leaves employees speechless, unsure whether to laugh, cry, or double-check their marriage certificates.

I may be a worked-up moron craving basic sanity and surely there is the other side to the story. Let us have a closer look at it, then. Is it not a perfect system? Your life outside work is irrelevant. Your relationships are mere distractions from corporate productivity. Why would anyone spend time with loved ones when they could be filling spreadsheets, attending meetings, and answering emails late into the night? Here is a world where all employees reach the epiphany that work is life and life is work. In this utopia, the glow of your laptop replaces the glow of your partner’s smile, and the clatter of your keyboard becomes the soundtrack to a life well spent. Romantic weekends? Replace them with team-building exercises. Candlelight dinners? Nothing beats the incandescence of a conference room.

The statement of the Loud and Thoughtless chieftain about working 90 hours and questioning the relevance of personal relationships deserves a place in the annals of corporate absurdity. It’s a satire of modern work culture that writes itself, exposing the vast divide between those who lead and those who toil. By reducing family life to a frivolous pastime and elevating work to the ultimate mission, he encapsulates the disconnect between corporate leaders and the lives of the people they command.