“Volunteering should give you energy, not drain your battery”
Volunteering is supposed to be good for the soul. Build community. Give meaning. Do things together with a common goal. You know — that whole “do good, feel good” thing. And you know, volunteering should give you energy, not drain your battery. Sounds plausible, right?
Hmm. “Volunteering should give you energy, not drain your battery” — that is a brilliant quote to print on a T-shirt or a large coffee mug!
Turns out, it only works if the system you’re volunteering for isn’t slowly trying to overwrite your boundaries, recompile your marriage, and gaslight your sense of logic into a fatal exception.
So today, Bob — my internal CEO — and I walked into the control room — and decided to quit. No fanfare. No meltdown. Just a simple memo: “Unworkable. I’m out.”.
This decision also feels like the perfect opportunity to introduce a few key staff members from my Brain Factory™ — the internal metaphor I use to make sense of, well… everything?
Bob
I already mentioned my CEO, Bob. Just Bob. No last name. Just… Bob.
Bob has been my trustworthy CEO since forever. He’s a logical guy — studied IT, did one elective course in management, and boom: That made him CEO of the factory. He doesn’t do emotions. He does spreadsheets, risk assessments, and recursive logic.
Shareholder, me
There’s only one shareholder in my company — one share, one vote — and that’s me. Just me. I’m the sole owner, the entire board, and technically, I have full control.
Technically.
Because let’s be honest… my influence is limited. I can call for a meeting, sure — but implementation? That’s a bureaucratic nightmare involving legal grey zones, interdepartmental resistance, and Bob claiming he’s totally on board with the changes, while quietly doing… nothing. hehe
And that’s not even accounting for the small-scale rebellions inside the departments whenever I ask for an update.
Ever tried changing a factory from the inside while it’s still running?
Yeah. That. 😛
Jill
She joined the team — or well, was somehow teleported into my factory — after my first real Kernel panic. I got punished, everything crashed, and right after that… this weird thing happened. The phone rings in Bob’s office — it’s an internal number he doesn’t recognize. Bob answers: “Who’s this?” A female voice replies: “This is Jill. I got a message from The Kernel that I had to call you.”
Bob frowns. “But… which department do you work for?” Jill answers truthfully: “I don’t know.” There’s a short pause. Then Jill says, “Wait. I see someone walking away from the door… maybe they left something.” She walks to the door, opens it — and sees that someone has plastered a fresh A4 sheet on it with duct tape. It reads:
“Introspection Department.”
Jill reads the paper, walks back to the phone. “Bob? It seems I’m from the Introspection Department???” Bob asks, “Do you have any idea what just happened?” Jill hesitates. “Eh… I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be doing here! Up until five minutes ago I was home in my apartment, then I felt an earthquake — and all of a sudden I’m here!”
Jill is the exact opposite of Bob. She does emotions. She does introspection. She asks difficult questions, sends unsolicited internal reports at 3AM, and quietly balances out Bob’s cold, recursive logic. He hates that. But deep down, even Bob knows: without Jill, the factory would collapse.
Ajay
Ajay runs the Battery Department on floor -1. He’s been there since day one, managing the most important — and most confusing — subsystem in the entire Brain Factory™: Energy.
Each morning, the battery is charged. That energy fuels everything — thinking, reacting, masking, functioning. And when it runs out? The whole system grinds to a halt. The control room of the Battery Department is a bizarre mix of modern tech and total mystery.
There are blinking lights no one understands.
A giant analog meter with no numbers, just a needle that dances like it’s possessed.
Post-it notes everywhere: “Don’t flip unless red light flashes twice” and “Ask Bob before touching this (he won’t know either).”
Behind a keycard-locked door — off-limits even to Roger — sits the actual battery. A black box, both literally and figuratively. Ajay’s written motto on the whiteboard sums it up:
// TODO: Understand the damn battery.
After years of guessing, Two maintenance guys ( I’ll introduce them later ) installed a power flow monitor. Now Ajay can measure energy going in and out — but that didn’t make things clearer. Some meetings drain the battery. Others recharge it. Sometimes the same meeting does both.
Ajay tracks it all via the Departmental Energy Drain Matrix™ — a screen that glitches whenever Creativity and Emotions run at the same time. Above the door: a glowing red DANGER lamp that activates when output exceeds input for more than X minutes. And X differs every day.
Yep.
And then there’s the big button. The one under the safety cap. The one that says: “Press in case of emergency.”
No one really knows what it does. But Ajay does. He’s the only one who knows when to press it. And when he does…
The whole factory goes dark.
Everything offline.
Except the Kernel.
Roger
Yeah, and this is a blatant copy from one of the best adventure games ever. Meet my janitor: Roger.
Roger Wilco.
Need I say more?
Roger leads the cleaning crew — or as I like to call them, The Department of Intentional Unintentional Sabotage. He is — and I say this with love — an overly enthusiastic janitor who believes in order above all else.
His motto?
“If it’s not nailed down, clean it up.”
He wears a jumpsuit, carries way too many keys, and unplugs things he doesn’t understand “just to be sure.” The fact that he missed the memo about the abolished clean desk policy? That tracks.
And of course, he still carries his Vaporizer from SQ3, when he used to clean dumpsters inside the ScumSoft megacorp.
Also: yes. This is a blatant reference to the Space Quest series. And I will not apologize for that.
Roger (Wilco) means well. But every time I’m on the verge of writing something meaningful, he mistakes it for “trash left behind during dream cleanup” and starts wiping the mental whiteboards.
Roger is responsible for quite a bit of chaos in my factory. He bumps into whiteboards, drops post-its on the floor, and replasters them on the wrong board — upside down, or occasionally dropping them into /dev/null. He unplugs charging cables mid-task, reboots machines that weren’t broken, and mutters things like “hmm, probably fine.”
And yet…
Because of his intentional unintentional chaos, I sometimes come up with the craziest — and brightest — ideas.
Pattern-breaks. Miswired connections. Lateral logic. Roger is not the architect of insight.
But he’s definitely the janitor that knocks over the box the insight was hiding in.
And yes — I keep him on as a staff member.
Why?
Nostalgia. Insight. Loyalty. Chaos. Pick one.
Back on topic
“Volunteering should give you energy, not drain your battery”
Ajay agrees. Volunteering should give energy — not suck the life out of your reserves until your internal systems start blinking red.
Today, something happened that pushed me over the edge. It was the classic straw that broke the camel’s back — the final drop, the last tick in the wrong direction on Ajay’s big dial.
Coming to this conclusion had a long warming-up period. It started almost exactly a year ago. At first, I didn’t really notice the changes. But Ajay did. Every time the specific topic was brought up, Ajay noticed a drop in the SoC — the State of Charge — of the battery.
Not dramatic. Just… enough. Like a slow leak you only recognize once the gauge hits the red for no apparent reason.
It can best be compared to an underground fire.
Like peat.
When you think it’s been extinguished, it just smolders quietly underground — out of sight, out of reach — until it flares up somewhere else.Same heat, different spot. That’s what this was. Every time I thought “it’s fine now”, something small would ignite again.
A message. A subtle remark. An awkward silence.
And Ajay would log another drop in battery levels.
Jill would write a quiet “this feels familiar” memo.
In March, there was a big flare-up after a meeting — the first real spike that even Bob couldn’t ignore. Ajay logged a massive discharge event.
Jill wrote her first formal memo about the situation. It started with one simple line:
“I don’t think we are appreciated or seen as full and respected members.”
That was also the first memo that actually ended up on Bob’s desk.
After that, the fire went underground again. No big incidents. Just the usual smoldering. I kept showing up. Kept helping. Kept pretending it was fine — because that’s what you do, right?
But last Monday, things really escalated. What used to be a slow, hidden burn was suddenly promoted to a full-blown forest fire.
I won’t go into the details, but let’s just say things got ugly — fast. And worse: it became personal. It wasn’t just about the role anymore. It was about me.
Ajay immediately noticed an insane drop in energy levels. The main battery plummeted deep into the red. Emergency lights started flashing in the control room.
“HELP. LOW BATTERY!”
(flashing in full caps, just in case someone — anyone — might take it seriously)
Bob noticed the lights starting to flicker. Ajay hovered over the emergency button — hand trembling, ready to trigger a full shutdown. Another step, and the factory would’ve gone dark. Total blackout. Probably followed by a Kernel Panic.
But he didn’t press it.
Jill intervened.
And that’s when I knew. This wasn’t a meltdown. This wasn’t panic.
This was my system going:
“Enough.”
So Bob and I walked into the control room. No fanfare. No yelling. Just one final memo, posted on the internal board:
“Unworkable. I’m out.”
I decided to quit entirely. To stop investing energy into something that had stopped returning anything meaningful.
And that… is where Roger comes into the picture.
He’s the guy who now has to walk past every whiteboard, every garbage bin, and every random corner of the factory where memos, pastel-colored post-its, and the occasional helium-filled balloon about this topic are still floating around.
Cleanup time.
Sorry, Roger.
Again. 😛
And honestly? This decision feels good. And strangely enough — this decision doesn’t feel heavy.
It feels…
uhh efficient?!
Brain out!