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Have you ever worked with someone who leaves confusion everywhere they go? You are having a level-headed conversation about something simple, work is moving, and then they arrive. What follows is ***Confusion as a Service***: a relentless focus on things that do not matter in any universe, with any meaning whatsoever.

Before they show up, my mind sits in a tranquil pool. The reality I am working in is distilled and full of purpose, and I am making real strides toward the goal.

Then the confusion factory fires up and billows smoke into the air. Everyone breathes. Pretty soon smoke is all there is, served up on a platter to illustrate the beauty of confusion.

Some people seem to enjoy it when it comes at them. Boredom, maybe. I do not understand the appeal, but I have watched enough people lean into the smoke to know it exists.

## The Highest Volume Possible

The most on-point Confusion as a Service I’ve witnessed came from a former co-worker. She sent me emails, Slack messages, and documents at the highest volume possible. She turned it to eleven, and there was no escape.

Stream of consciousness was her communication protocol. She was also the business analyst writing requirements. Every day I filtered her stream to reach the requirements underneath, and the requirements remained confusing post filter. This was a recurring [word buffer overflow][word-buffer-overflow].

So how bad was it? I ran a report to find out. I queried every email in my mailbox and stack-ranked the senders. She sat well above everyone else on that list, including my boss, by about a hundred times.

I told my boss. He said, "Just ignore all of it. Don't worry about responding to her."

That solved nothing. I still had to pull requirements out of the stream, and ignoring a channel you depend on is a wish, not a filter. For fucks sake.

## Nobody Says Anything

Sometimes when someone is running Confusion as a Service, I sit back and enjoy the shit show. I wonder whether anyone is going to get tired enough of the bullshit to say it out loud: "Could you just shut the fuck up and stop adding confusion to everyone's lives at the speed of light?"

Nobody does. The shit show unfolds as schedule.

Even a gentle nudge toward less confusion and more productivity meets resistance. It’s like two magnets pushed against each other. You cannot get them to stop no matter how hard you press.

I wonder what their life looks like away from work. Is the house a maze? Would it put hoarders to shame, one of the episodes where the place is falling apart and they still refuse to leave, mountains of chaos piled around them?

That kind of confusion replicates. It proliferates like an AI-generated virus moving through the internet at wormhole speed.

## What It Actually Costs

The bill for Confusion as a Service lands on everyone.

* Filtering burns hours. Twenty minutes a day separating signal from stream costs eighty hours a year, and none of it produces software.
* Requirements arrive degraded. A confusing requirement is [missing context][missing-context] with a due date, confusing features spring from it.
* Attention recovers slowly. Wading through noise slows you down.
* Good people go quiet. When every channel is flooded, the ones with something worth saying stop sending high quality packets.

That last one does the most damage. Users never see the meeting, but they live inside the software that came out of it.

## Apply Back Pressure

Software solved this problem decades ago. When a producer overwhelms a consumer, you skip the conversation about how the producer feels regarding throughput. You put a bounded queue between them and let the queue push back.

```mermaid
graph TB
    A[Confusion as a Service<br/>unbounded producer] --> B{Bounded channel}
    B -->|accepted| C[One place, one format]
    B -->|rejected| D[Returned to sender<br/>with a shape to fill]
    C --> E[Requirements I can build from]
    D --> A

    style A fill:#ffcdd2
    style B fill:#fff3e0
    style C fill:#e8f5e8
    style D fill:#f3e5f5
    style E fill:#e1f5fe
```

The same moves work on people, and none of them ask the sender to change.

**Bound the channel.** Pick one place where requirements count. Anything arriving somewhere else waits until it lands there. A message broadcast across four channels is one message that now costs four reads.

**Give the queue a shape.** A blank page invites a stream. A template with three fields invites three answers. Ask for the user, the behavior, and the signal that proves it works.

**Batch the interrupts.** Real-time is the most expensive delivery mode available. One scheduled fifteen-minute sync beats forty messages.

**Measure before you argue.** Feelings about volume are arguable. A stack-ranked sender count settles it, and it takes about a minute to produce from any mailbox export.

Take the number to your manager instead of the frustration. A count turns the discussion into one about workload, where a complaint turns it into one about personality.

## Clarity Is the Other Half

I doubt the confusion is malicious. The stream is how some people think, and they have no view of what it costs downstream. Back pressure beats confrontation for exactly that reason. A bounded channel makes the cost visible without making it personal.

Luckily, change is possible. Every team I have watched fix this fixed it with structure. The personality conversation never worked for anyone.

I will write the other half of this next, over in my [1,000 Life-Giving Potions][life-giving-potions] series: clarity as a service. Confusion arrives with a supply chain behind it. So does clarity, and clarity is the one worth building.

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[word-buffer-overflow]: https://jeffbailey.us/blog/2024/08/23/death-by-1000-cuts-10-word-buffer-overflow/
[missing-context]: https://jeffbailey.us/blog/2021/10/10/death-by-1000-cuts-6-missing-context/
[life-giving-potions]: https://jeffbailey.us/1000-life-giving-potions-1-continuous-improvement/