Intake Forms

The feeling arrived still alive,
Which the intake could not let survive.
It was boxed, named, and thinned,
Then administratively pinned,
Till the form could permit it to thrive.

The form asked for category first,
Then severity, source, and the worst.
By the time it was filed,
The raw story had smiled
Like a hostage politely rehearsed.

A need that refused to align
Was returned with a routing decline.
Once translated to fit,
It could enter a bit,
And be governed one field at a time.

The form needed only a name,
A box to be checked, and a reason to blame.
I clicked what was there
So the system would care,
And the output was largely the same.

The silence was clearly a plea
For a hardware replacement in Sector 3G.
We ordered a drive
To keep it alive,
Though the subject was actually me.

Please fill out the grief form in blue,
And ensure that your sadness is factually true.
If the weeping won’t stop,
Use the bucket and mop,
Then submit the wet paper to queue.

The subject submitted despair,
Which intake demanded they pare.
The scope was refined,
The edges aligned,
And logged as an issue of wear.

A trauma arrived in the queue,
Which clearly was factually true.
But lacking the code,
It blocked up the node,
So we told it to fill out form blue.

The grief was assigned to a drive,
To keep the telemetry live.
The disk was replaced,
The sadness erased,
And the sector continues to thrive.

The subject forgot a checkbox,
Which triggers the system-wide locks.
We cancelled the task,
It’s too much to ask,
And left it to rot in the docs.

A narrative filed in the night,
Has grown to a source of great light.
The text is now lore,
That governs the floor,
And the clerks pray to it out of sight.

The form had the interval wrong,
By seconds not notably long.
We halted the floor,
And deadbolted the door,
And summoned the guard with a gong.

The input was read by the screen,
And matched to the category green.
The data was saved,
The routing was paved,
And nothing occurred in between.

The sorrow was asked to repeat,
And ordered to format the sheet.
The cycle was spun,
Until it was done,
And the filing was rendered complete.