Consider, for a moment, that you are not Google

And That Installing Facial Recognition on the Office Microwave Might Be Overkill

The first thing everyone noticed about Ethan was that he had that look—bright-eyed, caffeinated, eager. He had a fresh laptop bag, the kind with unnecessary straps and buckles, and a notebook he actually planned to use.

The second thing everyone noticed was that he asked questions. A lot of questions. And not the normal “Where’s the bathroom?” kind, but deep, existential inquiries about things no one had ever needed to ask at PetalCove, a small, family-owned flower shop that had recently decided it needed to “embrace tech” because the owner’s nephew had said something about “disruption” at Thanksgiving.

Ethan had come from a “high-growth” startup, which meant he had spent eighteen months at a company that sold AI-powered toothbrushes before it spectacularly imploded under the weight of its own unhinged marketing promises. But he carried the lessons from that experience into his new role as PetalCove’s first-ever “Chief Strategy and Digital Scalability Officer,” a title he had given himself after gently suggesting to the owner, Marge, that “COO” was too operational and “CTO” was too restrictive. “Scalability” was the real challenge, he had explained, using the kind of hand gestures normally reserved for motivational speakers and people trying to sell you essential oils.

The thing about PetalCove was that it didn’t need to scale. It had been around for 37 years, sitting happily on the same street corner, selling flowers to the same neighborhood. They had ten employees, most of whom had been there since dial-up internet, and their ordering system consisted of a landline phone, a pen, and a well-worn ledger that Marge swore had never failed them once. Their website had been built by someone’s cousin in 2009 and still had an animated GIF of a tulip spinning for no reason. It worked fine. But Ethan saw inefficiency everywhere.

“Okay,” he said in his first all-hands meeting (which was held in the breakroom next to a fridge full of half-eaten sandwiches that belonged to no one and everyone). “I know we’ve been doing things the same way for a while, but I think it’s time we take a step back and ask: How do we scale?”

Marge blinked. “You mean, like, order more roses for Valentine’s Day?”

“No, no, I mean—how do we ensure that our infrastructure can support rapid growth when we expand?”

A long pause.

“Are we expanding?” asked Carol, the accountant who doubled as the HR department because she had once read a pamphlet on payroll compliance.

“Not yet,” Ethan admitted, “but we need to be ready.”

No one was quite sure for what.

The next day, Ethan started implementing “best practices.” He drew up a 47-page document outlining the “PetalCove Growth Roadmap,” which included a phased approach to optimizing “customer engagement touchpoints” (answering the phone) and developing an “enterprise-ready omnichannel fulfillment strategy” (selling flowers). He replaced their perfectly functional ledger with a cloud-based inventory management system that required a login, a two-step authentication process, and an app that none of the florists could figure out how to install.

He brought in Slack.

Before Ethan, communication at PetalCove had been simple: If you needed something, you yelled it across the shop. If someone was in the back, you walked over and told them. If something urgent happened, like running out of lilies, Carol would call Marge, and Marge would go “Ah, hell,” and drive to the supplier.

It was an elegant system. Ethan, however, declared it “archaic” and set up separate Slack channels for “General,” “Operations,” “Marketing,” “Strategic Growth,” “Customer Synergies,” and “Emergency Floral Inventory Management.” No one checked them.

“Guys,” he said one afternoon, staring at his laptop with the intensity of a man tracking missile trajectories, “we need to have better data-driven insights into our customer base.”

Carol, who was the only one even pretending to listen, shrugged. “I mean, we pretty much know our customers.”

“Exactly,” Ethan said, missing the point entirely. “But what if we could really know them? What if we implemented a customer relationship management system with predictive analytics?”

Marge, who had just walked in from a delivery, wiped her hands on her apron. “You mean like how we already know that Mrs. Henderson comes in every Thursday for pink peonies because they remind her of her wedding bouquet?”

Ethan sighed like a man burdened by the sheer weight of his own genius. “Yes, but imagine if we had a dashboard that told us that.”

“We…do?”

“No, no,” he said, “a digital one.”

And so, the CRM was implemented. It required employees to log every sale, every customer interaction, and every request, which meant that transactions that once took 30 seconds now took three minutes and required remembering a password. The shop’s oldest employee, Jim, who had been with PetalCove since the Reagan administration and still refused to text, quit after two days of trying to remember his login.

“Change is hard,” Ethan said solemnly.

The real tipping point came when Ethan introduced the “quarterly KPI review.”

No one knew what a KPI was, but Ethan had spent a full weekend creating a PowerPoint about them. The slides had graphs. One of them showed a projected revenue growth of 400% over the next five years. “Now, to reach these targets,” he said, pacing the break room like a TED Talk speaker who had accidentally wandered into a bodega, “we’ll need to rethink our fulfillment process.”

Marge, whose entire fulfillment process consisted of putting flowers in a van and driving them to customers, squinted. “Rethink how?”

Ethan, for reasons unclear to everyone but himself, had become fixated on drones.

“Imagine a world,” he said, “where we don’t rely on outdated last-mile delivery methods, but instead leverage aerial logistics.”

Carol, who had not had enough coffee for this conversation, rubbed her temples. “Are you saying…we use drones to deliver bouquets?”

Ethan beamed. “Exactly.”

Marge pinched the bridge of her nose. “Ethan. We sell flowers. In person. To people who walk into the shop.”

“Yes, but think of the scalability!”

The meeting ended with Carol confiscating the company credit card after discovering that Ethan had put a deposit on three experimental delivery drones.

And yet, despite everything, Ethan remained undeterred. The problem, as he saw it, wasn’t that his ideas were impractical. It was that PetalCove wasn’t thinking big enough. If they just made a few more adjustments—maybe implemented machine learning for bouquet recommendations or pivoted to a subscription-based floral delivery model—they could be the Uber of flowers.

All they had to do was scale.

The downfall began, as these things often do, with a dashboard.

Ethan had spent weeks designing it, laboring over the details like a Renaissance artist painting a ceiling no one had asked for. The PetalCove “Strategic Growth Command Center” was a sprawling, data-packed monstrosity, visible on the giant monitor he had installed in the breakroom (which no one had wanted, but now had to live with). Every customer interaction, inventory movement, and delivery schedule was meticulously tracked and converted into “real-time insights.”

“It’s beautiful,” Ethan whispered to himself during the grand unveiling.

Carol squinted at the screen. “Why is there a live counter for tulip purchases?”

“To detect emerging market trends,” Ethan said.

Marge, exhausted from a morning spent actually running a business, took a slow sip of her coffee. “We sell tulips. People buy tulips. What trend?”

Ethan smiled, because this was his moment. He clicked, and the screen filled with a color-coded map of the city. “Look at this heatmap,” he said. “We’re selling a disproportionately high number of sunflowers in the northeast quadrant. If we cross-reference this with weather patterns and social media sentiment analysis, we can optimize our supply chain to—”

“Ethan.” Marge set her cup down with the air of a woman who had seen things. “That’s Mrs. Kowalski. She orders sunflowers every week because they remind her of her childhood farm.”

Ethan blinked at the screen, which had Mrs. Kowalski’s entire purchase history visualized as an ominous red cluster.

“So we don’t need the heatmap?” he asked.

“No.”

“But it could be useful for predicting—”

“She calls us on the phone, Ethan.”

It was a devastating blow.

But Ethan was a man of vision, and visionaries do not falter in the face of minor setbacks, such as the entire company ignoring their analytics platform.

Instead, he moved on to his next great mission: automation.

PetalCove’s backend operations were, in his mind, a relic of a bygone era. Orders were taken manually. Deliveries were scheduled with basic human coordination. Payments were processed without a single blockchain in sight. It was chaos.

So, without telling anyone, Ethan integrated a scheduling system powered by an AI-powered supply chain optimizer called “FloraSyncPro™”—a software he had found in a “Future of Logistics” Slack channel and purchased with what remained of the marketing budget.

It did not go well.

The first sign of trouble was when a single order of daisies somehow triggered an automated request to restock 10,000 units. The second was when every employee received an automated email informing them that their work schedules had been “optimized for peak efficiency.”

The third was when the delivery driver, an ex-Marine named Ron who did not tolerate nonsense, threatened to put Ethan “inside the algorithm” if he ever touched his route again.

For two days, orders disappeared into the ether. Bouquets that had been paid for vanished into an “unfulfilled request backlog.” The system sent delivery confirmations to people who had not received anything. An automated email informed a customer that her grandmother’s funeral arrangement had been “canceled due to predictive demand analytics.”

When Carol finally dragged Ethan into the back office and demanded he explain himself, he simply gestured at the dashboard, which was now displaying a blinking red alert labeled “INVENTORY DISRUPTION EVENT” in an alarmingly large font.

“I don’t understand,” Ethan muttered, clicking frantically. “It should be working. The model was trained on enterprise-level supply chains—”

Carol, who had just spent the past hour taking screaming phone calls from the funeral customer, had had enough. “Ethan, we don’t HAVE a supply chain! We buy flowers from a guy named Ricky! He comes in a van!”

Ethan stared at her.

“So…” he said slowly, “not a supply chain… but rather a decentralized, vendor-driven fulfillment ecosystem?”

Carol left the room before she committed a crime.

By the end of the week, the automation system was quietly dismantled, the dashboard screen was turned off, and the staff had unanimously decided to never speak of it again. But Ethan remained undeterred. If automation wasn’t the answer, then maybe the problem was something even deeper.

“Guys,” he said, in the way only someone who has never worked a real job says things, “we need to think about our culture.”

Marge, who had just spent the morning trimming stems with her bare hands, did not look up. “What.”

“Our company culture. We need a more structured framework. Values. A mission statement. A brand identity that resonates with stakeholders.”

“We sell flowers.”

“Exactly. But why?”

Marge squinted at him. “Because people want flowers?”

Ethan inhaled, ready to launch into a speech about “emotional brand positioning,” but he was interrupted by Carol walking in with an envelope.

“We’re being audited,” she said, dropping it onto the table.

Marge frowned. “Audited for what?”

Carol sighed. “Apparently, we’re now a Delaware-based holding company?”

Silence.

Everyone turned to Ethan, who paled.

“Okay,” he said, raising his hands. “I can explain.”

Ethan had not, in fact, anticipated needing to explain anything. In his mind, everything he had done made perfect sense. PetalCove had been a simple, small-town flower shop when he arrived, a humble operation oblivious to the grand possibilities of modern business. But under his visionary leadership, it had become—well, technically, according to the paperwork—PetalCove Holdings, LLC, a legally distinct Delaware-based corporate entity with a subsidiary structure, multiple registered trademarks, and, as of last Tuesday, a Cayman Islands post office box.

Ethan had done this because, as he had confidently informed no one at all, “every business needs a strong foundation for growth.” This was also why he had spent an entire afternoon setting up a pitch deck about a possible Series A funding round.

The fact that PetalCove had no investors, no plans to seek investors, and no reason to even have a funding round had not deterred him.

“You filed what?” Marge’s voice had the strained quality of someone who had just learned their humble family business was now structured to potentially evade international tax law.

Ethan swallowed. “Okay, so, first off—let’s take a step back and think about this rationally—”

Carol slapped the paperwork down onto the table with the force of an executioner’s axe. “WHY ARE WE A HOLDING COMPANY?”

Ethan took a deep breath. “Scalability.”

Marge’s eye twitched. “Ethan. I have been running this shop for thirty-seven years. What, precisely, is it that you believe we need to ‘scale?’”

Ethan, sensing hostility, launched into a well-rehearsed TED Talk stance. “Look. The reality is, if we ever want to expand—”

“We don’t.”

“—or franchise—”

“We won’t.”

“—or establish a direct-to-consumer e-commerce presence with a vertically integrated supply chain—”

Carol pressed a finger to her temple. “We buy flowers from a guy named Ricky.”

Ethan sighed as if they were simple-minded peasants, incapable of understanding the grand architecture of modern business. “Look. Ricky is great, but he’s just one supplier. What if we need to secure multiple vendors? What if we need leverage in supplier negotiations? What if—”

Marge held up a hand. “Did you take out a business loan?”

Ethan hesitated. “Not exactly.”

Silence.

Carol clenched her jaw. “Explain.”

“So, funny story—”

The “story” turned out to be not funny at all.

While integrating the new business structure, Ethan had, in his boundless enthusiasm, applied for a “growth and expansion” small business loan. “Applied” in this case meaning “maxed out.” PetalCove Holdings, LLC was now the proud recipient of $250,000 in capital it did not need, structured under an interest rate best described as “loan shark-adjacent.”

Marge closed her eyes and massaged the bridge of her nose.

Carol muttered something that sounded vaguely like an exorcism.

The other employees, who had been listening in horror, slowly backed out of the room, as if retreating from a live crime scene.

“Okay, okay,” Ethan said quickly, sensing things were spiraling. “But look at the opportunity this gives us! We can expand our digital footprint. We can develop proprietary floral arrangement technology. We can even—”

“Ethan.” Marge’s voice had reached a new octave. “What. Do. You. Mean. By. ‘Proprietary Floral Arrangement Technology’?”

Ethan perked up. “I’m so glad you asked! I’ve been working on a prototype for an AI-driven floral design assistant that can algorithmically generate bouquet compositions based on data-driven consumer sentiment analysis. The system can—”

“YOU MEAN A ROBOT THAT ARRANGES FLOWERS?”

Ethan grinned. “Exactly!”

Carol was now gripping the table like she was trying to keep herself from launching across it and strangling him.

“Ethan,” she said, voice deadly calm. “What do you think we do here?”

Ethan hesitated. “Sell flowers?”

“No. We arrange flowers. With our hands. People come in and they talk to us. We give them advice, we help them pick things out. That’s the business.”

Ethan frowned. “But—”

“It’s literally the entire thing, Ethan. That’s the only thing we do. You have invented a machine to replace the only job we actually perform.”

Ethan shifted uncomfortably. “Okay, yes, but if we really think about it, the human component is—”

Marge abruptly stood up. “Nope. No. I am not doing this today.”

She walked out.

Carol followed.

The door swung shut.

Ethan sat there, blinking at the empty room.

The next few weeks were tense.

PetalCove, a business that had functioned perfectly well for nearly four decades without a single data-driven insight, was now in full-blown chaos. The customer experience had been “optimized” into oblivion. Deliveries were now scheduled by a buggy algorithm that once sent a dozen sympathy arrangements to a birthday party. The website, which Ethan had redesigned to be “e-commerce ready,” crashed every time someone tried to place an order.

Marge tried to undo the damage, but the “expansion loan” loomed over them like a vulture. Their modest savings were now tied up in Ethan’s various “strategic initiatives,” including—but not limited to—a failed attempt at an NFT-based “Floral Ownership Experience,” an ill-advised pivot to a “floral subscription box,” and the drones.

Oh yes. The drones.

Because Ethan had not given up on them.

One morning, the staff arrived to find three prototype delivery drones sitting in the breakroom. Ethan, beaming, was in the process of programming them.

“This is it,” he announced. “This is the future of PetalCove.”

It was not.

It took precisely one test flight before a drone veered wildly off course, crashed into a parked car, and caused a minor but legally actionable fire.

Two hours later, Marge returned from her emergency meeting with the insurance company, pulled Ethan aside for a "strategic alignment discussion," and, after a deeply one-sided exchange of perspectives, it was firmly decided (by Marge) that Ethan’s "visionary leadership" would be best applied somewhere else—immediately, permanently, and preferably far, far away.

“You’re making a mistake,” Ethan said as he packed up his things. “This business has so much potential.”

Marge, standing with her arms crossed, just gestured at the still-smoking drone wreckage outside.

A month later, PetalCove’s website had been reverted to its old, GIF-heavy glory. The inventory system had gone back to pencil and paper. Ricky still delivered flowers in his van. The drones had been quietly disposed of.

And, in an entirely unrelated incident, a mysterious Delaware-based holding company vanished overnight.

Marge never asked.

Carol never spoke of it again.

And somewhere out there, Ethan was probably trying to scale a lemonade stand.