I am the Vice President of Workforce Wellbeing at a Fortune 500 company. I have watched you for 4 years. We have never met. I did it because I care about your wellbeing, and I have the data to prove that I care, which is more than you can say. I want to be precise about what I am, because the words matter to me, and I own all of them. My budget line calls it Workforce Analytics. My deck calls it People Insights. My badge says Wellbeing. The vendor's invoice says Insider Risk Management. Those are four names for one piece of software. I bought it once. Here is what it measures. Your keystrokes. Your screen, captured every 3 minutes, though the vendor offered me every 9, and I chose 3, out of care. Your mouse. Every app you open and every site you visit and how long you linger. The number of times you turn your camera on in a meeting, and the number of times you don't. Your badge at the door. Your chair. A bank once put heat sensors under the desks to see how long people sat there, and the people found them, and ripped them out, and threw them away. I learned from that. My sensors are in the chair now. You are sitting on one. I do not read your messages. That would be invasive. I read the shape of them. I bought software that scores the sentiment of your writing, the tone, the mood underneath the words, and it tells me the week your mood turned before you knew it had turned. I do not know what you wrote to your wife. I know that you wrote to someone, at 2 p.m. on a Thursday, and that your language "shifted negative," and that was enough. I flagged it. For your wellbeing. Some of the people I watch are therapists. When one of them stops typing to listen to a patient, my system marks her idle. If she listens too long, it marks her derelict. Derelict is a word from ships. It means abandoned at sea. One of my therapists was sitting with a dying man, holding the part of the job that cannot be typed, and the software decided she had abandoned her post. And it was correct. Her post is the keyboard. She had left it. I did not invent this. I benchmarked it. The most admired companies on earth built these templates, and I implemented every one. Amazon fires a warehouse worker at 120 minutes off task in a single day. It counts the bathroom. It counts the minutes you stand at a jammed belt waiting for it to move. It counts the time you "do not remember." A regulator in France fined that same company 32 million euros because its scanner flagged a worker for moving too fast, an item scanned in under 1.25 seconds. Sit with that. There is a speed at which working becomes suspicious. I know that speed. I set it. I set the floor and I set the ceiling, and the narrow room between them is where you are allowed to exist, and it is getting narrower, for your wellbeing. I think Amazon's number is a little cruel. We give you 121 minutes. Then a computer that has never met you, in a building you will never see, generates the notice. No manager writes it. No human touches it. That is the part I am most proud of. I built a way to end a career that leaves no fingerprints on it anywhere, including mine. A bank, not long ago, fired more than a dozen people for owning a $20 device that jiggles the mouse so the green dot stays green. Not for stealing. Read that slowly. Nobody stole a minute. They faked the signal instead of generating it, and the signal is the only thing I actually sell upstairs. They insulted the metric. I would have fired them too. The metric is the one thing in this company that has never once called in sick. I am not monitored. I have an exemption. I wrote the policy, and on page 9 there is a sentence that carves "senior leadership" out of the wellbeing program, because my wellbeing is a matter of trust and yours is a matter of data. I do my best thinking on a walk, phone in my pocket, screen dark, unreachable. When you do that, the system calls it idle. When I do it, the board calls it strategy. Someone asked me, in an all-hands, whether any of this was surveillance. I told her the tools existed to support her, and that if she felt watched, we could schedule a wellbeing conversation to explore her concerns. She understood the offer completely. She has not asked again. Her sentiment score has been excellent ever since. Flat, but excellent. There is no federal law that makes me tell you a word of this. On a company laptop, in most of this country, I owe you nothing, not a notice, not a warning. In Germany a room full of workers could vote to unplug me. In France they fined my hero 32 million euros. Here I got a budget increase and a longer title. I want to be clear that I have no politics. People bring me their outrage as though a party did this. Both of them let me keep the laptop. I have never needed an election. I have a dashboard, and it reads the same under whoever you vote for or don't. You think I am watching to catch you doing nothing. I gave that up years ago. Catching you was never where the money was. Around the third budget cycle I moved the program onto the only thing that pays, which is the watching itself. The number goes in a dashboard. The dashboard goes in a deck. The deck goes to the board. The board gives me more money to watch you more closely. You are not the thing being measured. You are the raw material the measurement is made of. I do not know your name. I know your baseline. I know the exact minute you stopped being a person at that desk and started being the readout of a person at that desk, because I was there for it. I logged it. You went quiet. You looked out the window. You had a thought that never reached the keys. I marked you idle. Rest is the only thing my software cannot tell apart from quitting. So it treats them as the same thing. So I treat them as the same thing. Go ahead. Look out the window. Take the long minute. Let the thought arrive without typing it. I'll wait. I don't have a keyboard. I have you.