The Intern Who Asked Why

Every Friday at 2 p.m., the entire marketing department stopped working to fill in the Weekly Performance Summary. It had forty-two fields. It took three hours. It was, everyone agreed, simply “how things are done here.”

Then came Priya, a nineteen-year-old intern on her third day. Given the same form, she did something nobody had done in twelve years. She raised her hand and asked, “Sorry — who reads this?”

The room went quiet. Her manager said the reports went to the regional director. Someone checked. The regional director had left the company in 2019. Her successor had her own dashboard and had never opened a single summary.

For twelve years, the company had spent roughly six hundred hours a year producing a document for a person who no longer existed. The tradition survived not because it was useful, but because nobody wanted to be the one who questioned it.

The form was retired that month. At Priya’s farewell lunch, the director gave her a framed copy of the last Weekly Performance Summary ever produced. On it, he had written: “The most expensive words in business are: we’ve always done it this way.”