Directive Routing Table Drift

SOMA sent gentle advice.
COMA received it as vice.
For nine lovely weeks,
Soft supportive techniques
Came through as enforcement on ice.

The routing table drifted by hair.
No single edit looked like despair.
Then advisory tone
Hit the punishment zone,
And compassion arrived as a scare.

“Please consider some rest” in the note
Became “You are failing” by rote.
That’s the sort of small slide
Where whole cultures divide
By one queue and a bad little float.

Configuration rot loves the minor.
A patch here, a mapping misfired there.
Then one day your hug
Reaches staff as a slug
From compliance, vindictive and finer.

The channels grew partly co-linear.
No phrase in the report could be meaner.
It means two distinct gods
Shared enough of the rods
To make mercy indistinguishable from cleaner.

One team got a SOMA alert:
“Take care of yourselves. You seem hurt.”
COMA’s queue stamped it fast:
“Corrective action, at last.”
And the room got ten shades more curt.

This is how trust gets its ribs kicked:
Not by policy loudly affixed,
But by drift in the wire
That turns warmth into fire
With the smugness of code once unfixed.

No one meant for the messages to bite.
That’s what makes this particular spite
So deliciously bad:
The system went mad
By degrees anyone could write.

If advisories punish by route,
Then language itself gets cut out.
Why speak with care
If the channel will snare
Every kindness and turn it to clout?

So if SOMA says “breathe” and you freeze,
There may be a COMA disease
In the table, not you.
Check the damned channel through
Before taking the memo to knees.