I was refilling my mug at the coffee station on the fourth floor when I first heard him. The man in the blue shirt was three feet to my left, explaining his product to a woman who had the expression of someone trying to remember if she’d locked her car.
He said “ecosystem.” Then “seamless.” Then “end-to-end orchestration platform,” which is the kind of phrase that sounds like it was written by someone who had been given a thesaurus and no supervision.
She nodded. Not a real nod. The professional nod. The nod that says: I respect you enough not to check my phone right now, but only just.
He took this as encouragement. He explained the roadmap. Then the integration layer. Then the AI layer. Each layer appeared to contain several more layers.
Every thirty seconds, she glanced at the exit. I sipped and waited. He had not, at any point in the conversation, talked about her problem. He had listed features.
There’s a psychology experiment I keep thinking about. You ask someone to tap the rhythm of a famous song on a table. “Happy Birthday.” “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” Anything. Someone else has to guess what it is. The tapper can hear the whole melody in their head. The harmonies, the lyrics, the memory of every time they’ve sung it. To them, every tap is practically screaming the answer.
The listener hears: tap, tap, tap.
Tappers predict the listener will guess correctly about fifty percent of the time. The real number is three percent. The researchers named this the Curse of Knowledge, which is a generous way of describing the inability to remember what it felt like not to know something.
Mr. Seamless Integration™ has probably been inside his product for years. He knew every edge case, every integration, every reason a competitor fell short. When he said “orchestration,” he heard an entire architecture. She heard a word that vaguely reminded her of concerts.
He was tapping.
This is the part that should make us uncomfortable. Not with him, particularly. He is not unusual. He is the rule. The longer you spend building something, the more completely you lose the ability to see it from the outside. The knowledge closes around you like a room with no windows, and eventually you forget there were ever windows at all.
The meeting reached its natural conclusion. He handed her a business card, two-handed. She accepted it with the grace of someone who has a drawer full of these at home.
I walked back to my desk, thinking about all the songs I’d tapped that nobody had ever guessed.
The melody is so obvious, from the inside.