Managing a cemetery is mostly a matter of logistics and geology, but there is a strange data problem that keeps me up at night. Yesterday, a tourist stopped me near the north gate and asked for the old military section. I pointed her toward the weeping willow, thinking of the rows of granite markers that sit just behind it.

Ten minutes later, I realized I had sent her toward the drainage pond. I looked up, ready to shout an apology, but she was already gone. She didn’t come back to complain. She didn’t tell me I was wrong. She simply exited the gates and became a missing data point in the history of my day. I have no way of knowing if she found what she was looking for or if she left thinking the groundskeeper was a fool.

In the world of digital platforms and high-speed commerce, this is the prevailing condition. We celebrate low switching costs as the ultimate victory for the consumer. We believe that when it is easy to leave, the company must be better. This is a logical fallacy that ignores the psychology of

I just dropped the small ceramic space heater, and the sound it made against the floorboards was the sound of a very specific kind of failure. It didn’t shatter. It didn’t explode in a shower of sparks. It simply emitted a dull, plastic “thud” and now sports a hairline fracture across the intake vent-a jagged white nerve against the matte grey casing.

I was trying to move it closer to my left foot because the “convection” in this room was clearly failing to reach my big toe, despite the device being set to its maximum output. I sat there for a moment, staring at the crack, and realized I had been counting the ceiling tiles again, waiting for the room to feel “correct.”

There are forty-two tiles in this room, by the way. I know this because when you are waiting for a convector to do the work of a radiator, or for a radiator to act like a fan heater, you have a lot of time to observe the architecture of your own discomfort.

The Taxonomy vs. The Circle

When you walk into a shop or browse a digital catalogue, you are confronted with a list of names that sound like they belong in a thermodynamics

T he glass door hit my face. My nose made a sound. It was a dull thud. I did not see the glass because the glass was clean. The glass was a clear barrier between the lobby and the office. I fell back. My nose began to bleed.

A woman behind a desk stood up. She did not say anything. She handed me a white tissue. I took the tissue. I held the tissue to my nose. The tissue turned red. I sat in a hard chair. I looked at the door. The door was still there. I had ignored the door because I thought the path was empty.

A Path That Looks Clear

A lender has a similar problem with software. The lender sees a path. The path looks clear. The lender has a book of business. The book of business has 19,142 contracts. These contracts are small-ticket contracts. These contracts cover office printers and delivery vans and small tractors.

The contracts are simple. The payments are the same every month for forty-eight months. The lender also has 884 deals. These deals are different. These deals are for regional aircraft and construction cranes and factory lines. These deals are complex. These deals have structured payments. These deals have tax indemnities.

I once spent an entire evening trying to trick a bimetallic thermostat with a bag of frozen peas and a hair dryer, convinced that if I could just manipulate the local sensors, the universe-or at least the boiler room in the basement of my Balti apartment block-would acknowledge my personal reality. It was a pathetic display of scientific illiteracy.

I believed that the “system” was an attentive waiter standing by to refill my glass of warmth. I was wrong. The system wasn’t looking at my shivering shoulders or the way the windows were weeping condensation; it was looking at a spreadsheet maintained by a man I would never meet, who was himself waiting for a specific meteorological alignment that had nothing to do with the fact that I was wearing a scarf indoors.

The Silent Collateral of Orhei

In Orhei, at 6:42 AM, Tudor Grigore is currently performing a similar ritual of frustration, though his is more dignified. He is pulling on a second pair of wool socks, the thick kind his mother-in-law knitted, while his seven-year-old daughter, Maria, sits at the kitchen table.

Maria, who is currently tracing the outlines of a geography map in a puffer jacket because her fingers are too stiff for fine motor skills, represents the silent collateral damage of a municipal promise. Outside,