The neon tube buzzed with a sharp, electric resentment, a violet hum that vibrated through the marrow of my teeth as I held it against the bench. I was halfway through bending the ‘R’ for a dive bar down on 47th Street, sweat stinging my eyes, when I realized I hadn’t heard a single chirp from my pocket in nearly 107 minutes. Later, I’d find the culprit: a rogue thumb-flick while I was hauling the ladder, silencing the world entirely. I’d missed 17 calls. Seventeen people-clients, suppliers, my sister-had screamed into the digital void, and I was blissfully occupied with the smell of scorched ozone and the delicate tension of glass.

The Cathedral of Solutionism

There is a specific, tactile reality to neon that doesn’t exist in the corporate offices I see from my workshop window. When I look up at the skyscraper across the alley, I see 27 floors of people bathed in the blue light of monitors, staring at dashboards designed to tell them how much work they are doing, rather than actually doing the work. It is a cathedral of solutionism. I spent seven years in that world before I traded a keyboard for a blowtorch, and the smell of the frustration is exactly the same today as it was in 2017.

I remember the day the ‘Synergy-Flow’ rollout happened at my old firm. We were herded into a conference room that smelled like stale roasted coffee and expensive expectations. A consultant with a $7,700 suit told us that this software would eliminate internal email by 87%. It was a beautiful promise. We spent two hours learning how to tag, how to ‘sprint,’ and how to integrate our calendars into a singular, glowing hive mind. We were told this was the end of the friction.

Ten minutes after the training ended, I sat down at my desk and opened my laptop. My inbox was already choking. I had 37 new messages. Every single one of them was a colleague asking a question about the ‘Synergy-Flow’ training. We had purchased a tool to stop the emails, and the first thing we did was use the old, broken system to complain about the new, broken system. This is the organizational reflex: when the culture is sick, we don’t change the diet; we just buy a more expensive fork.

Companies are currently pouring millions-sometimes $77 million or more in aggregate across departments-into the latest suite of productivity enhancers. They want the ‘Amazon’ efficiency or the ‘Google’ speed, but they are unwilling to address the structural rot that makes these tools necessary. If you have a culture where every decision requires a 7-person committee and a two-hour Zoom call, no amount of Slack integration is going to save you. In fact, it usually makes it worse. Now, instead of waiting for a meeting, you are being pinged in real-time, 47 times an hour, by people who are ‘just checking in’ on the progress of a task that they are currently preventing you from finishing.

I see this in my shop all the time. People come in wanting a neon sign that ‘pops’-they want the glow, the vibe, the aesthetic. But they don’t want to pay for the master electrician to wire the transformer correctly. They want the shortcut. In the software world, we call this ‘feature bloat.’ We add layers of complexity because it feels like progress. It’s a lot harder to say, ‘We are going to stop having meetings on Wednesdays’ than it is to say, ‘We bought a new enterprise-grade scheduling AI.’ One requires a change in human behavior; the other just requires a signature on a purchase order.

The Platform vs. The Output

But most companies won’t stop at the simple tool. They want the ‘Platform.’ They want the thing that encompasses everything, because if the software is responsible for ‘the workflow,’ then no individual human has to be responsible for the output. It is a massive, expensive exercise in passing the buck. I’ve seen teams spend 47% of their week just updating the status of their work in various trackers. If you ask them what they actually produced that week, they point to the green bars on the screen. The green bars aren’t the work. The green bars are the evidence that you were present while the work was supposed to be happening.

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Complexity is the camouflage of the unproductive.

I am currently staring at a pile of 7 broken transformers on my floor. They failed because they were overloaded, trying to push too much voltage through wires that were never meant to handle it. Corporate culture is the same. We overload our employees with ‘connectivity’ and then wonder why they burn out. We give them 7 different ways to message each other and then act surprised when it takes 17 days to get a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on a project. We have optimized for the appearance of work-the frantic typing, the endless notifications, the ‘busy’ status on the chat-at the total expense of actual, focused creation.

Jade A.-M., the technician I work with on bigger installations, once told me that the most beautiful part of a neon sign is the ‘dead space’-the blacked-out sections of glass where no light shines. Without the black paint, the letters would just be a chaotic blur of glowing gas. You wouldn’t be able to read the sign. Our workdays are missing the dead space. We are so afraid of the silence, of the ‘offline’ status, that we fill every available second with digital noise. We think that if we aren’t ‘collaborating,’ we aren’t being valuable.

The $777 Mistake: Smart vs. Simple

I’ve made mistakes in this transition from the office to the workshop. I once spent $777 on a specialized vacuum pump that I thought would revolutionize my degassing process… I wasted a month of production trying to make the ‘smart’ pump work because I fell for the same lie that every CEO falls for: that a more complex tool equals a better result.

If we really wanted to optimize our work, we wouldn’t look for more software. We would look for the ‘No’ button. We would look for the courage to tell a client that a 17-minute phone call is better than a 47-email thread. We would recognize that trust is the ultimate productivity hack. When we replace trust with tracking, we aren’t being ‘data-driven.’ We are being cowards.

The Violet Hum Returns

The violet hum of the ‘R’ is finally steady now. The gas is pure, the vacuum held, and the electrodes are firing at exactly the right temperature. I’ve finally checked my phone. Those 17 missed calls? Only two of them actually mattered. The rest were ‘checking in,’ ‘following up,’ and ‘wanted to circle back.’ If I had been available, I would have spent my morning answering them, and the sign wouldn’t be finished.

We are addicted to the flicker of the notification because it feels like a pulse. But a pulse isn’t a purpose. We spend our lives polishing the tools and never actually building the house. Maybe the reason your company’s new software feels like a burden isn’t because the software is bad. Maybe it’s because the software is doing exactly what you asked it to do: it’s keeping you busy enough to forget that you aren’t actually making anything.