An ocean god figure seated at a desk, evoking Kafka's Poseidon buried in accounts rather than sailing the sea

The story was called “Poseidon.”

The god of the sea, it turns out, never actually sails it. He sits at a desk going over the accounts. He keeps assistants around but won’t really use them, because he insists on checking every figure himself. He rules an entire ocean that he’s never even looked at once.

I build and run martech stacks for a living but I’ve been Poseidon.

A stack is a set of tools that trade data. The ad platform passes to the form, the form to the CRM, the CRM to the email tool, and back around. When it works, nobody thinks about it. When it breaks, it breaks quietly, and someone has to go find the leak.

That someone was usually me, and I let it become the whole job. Re-checking the sync after every release. Babysitting the integration that fell over whenever a vendor changed an API. Confirming by hand that a lead actually landed where it should. Reconciling two tools that disagreed about the same number.

This is real work and it expands to fill whatever time you give it. It feels productive in a way that’s hard to put down.

We finally have tools that could hold the plumbing for us and pipelines that watch themselves. We can build checks that catch a broken handoff before a human even notices. The maintenance is the part that’s ready to hand off.

But plenty of us still won’t get up from the desk, because the desk is where we feel necessary. The sync works or it doesn’t but when you fix it you feel the fix. The strategy work, the part the whole stack is supposed to serve, never gives you a win that clean.

Nobody hands you a passing test for “did we build the right system for where this organization is going.” So we stay down in the pipes, which at least tell us when they’re fixed.

I don’t have a tidy solution for this. I left that room, looked at my own week, and tried to sort the ocean from the plumbing.