[ESSAY] The $100,000 I’ll Never See and the Vacation I Can’t Take
How corporate surveys simulate generosity while draining your will to live
You’ll see three types of posts in this space, twice a week:
Essays: Quiet reflections and sharp critiques from inside the system.
Flash fiction: Brief, surreal vignettes that bend the rules of healthcare, memory, and paperwork.
Serial: Working Terms, a novella that mistakes survival for success, told one chapter at a time.
They rotate weekly. You don’t need to read everything, but you’re welcome to.
The login screen features a professionally lit photo of a white family strolling through a privately maintained trail system, because nothing says health equity like curated landscapes, generational wealth, and selective access.
Upon logging in, just below the “Mandatory Cybersecurity Module” and just above the “Quarterly Trauma Charting Competency,” there’s a cheerful new tab: June Fun Survey! The exclamation point is doing all the heavy lifting.
Clicking it opens a pastel-hued pop-up box, animated confetti going across the header. The prompt reads:
“🎉 Would you rather …
✈️ Travel for a year anywhere you want (all expenses paid)
💸 OR receive $100,000 with no strings attached?”1
It’s unclear who authored this question, but one suspects it was someone who hasn’t worked a weekend since 2015.
Below the question are user responses, visible to other employees in an attempt at something approximating “community.” One answer reads:
“If I was able to take time off of work without losing my job, I would travel…”2
It is marked with a smiley face emoji, either ironically or algorithmically.
And if you’re still reading, this is where reality re-enters the room.
The survey isn’t offensive in the way a cruel manager or a canceled PTO request is. It’s offensive in the way that your boss wishing you a “Happy Nurses Week” while handing you a granola bar is offensive: it’s morally antiseptic, surgically distanced from reality, and perversely well-meaning. It’s a cheerful metaphor for gaslighting.
They’ve invented a fantasy in which their employees have lives with flexible working hours. They’ve offered a dream vacation or cash prize in the abstract, knowing full well that the average employee hasn’t been able to schedule a dental cleaning in three years. They’ve confused morale with whimsy. They’ve mistaken imagination for dignity.
How does a hospital destroy morale? Like this.
Not with a single crushing blow. But with a million soft gestures that pretend the crushing blow never happened. With surveys that ask if you’d like a unicorn or a golden goose, when what you want is to pee before 3 p.m.
They destroy morale not by yelling at you to work harder, but by asking you which color cupcake you’d like for National Healthcare Workers Month, right after denying your FMLA request.
It’s death by a thousand chipper emails.
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This community engagement survey is not fabricated.
This answer to that survey is not fabricated, either.