The Priority Apocalypse
The apocalypse didn’t start with zombies or nuclear war. It started with an office worker who’d had enough.
I remember the exact moment my brain broke. It was 2:23 PM on a Wednesday, and I’d just received my fourteenth “ASAP” request of the day. This one came from a middle manager who had apparently discovered the caps lock key and felt compelled to use it in every email. Their latest masterpiece read: “NEED THIS PROOFED ASAP!!! VERY TIME SENSITIVE!!!” The document in question was a lunch order.
That’s when I decided to conduct a social experiment. If the entire corporate world operated on the assumption that their urgency trumped everyone else’s existence, why not apply this principle universally? I called it Operation Priority Apocalypse.
Phase One began at Whole Foods. When I was done shopping, I didn’t wait. Instead, I walked to the front of the checkout line, shopping basket swinging.
“Excuse me,” I announced to the twenty people ahead of me, “but this is a priority checkout. I have a hard deadline in eight minutes.” I held up my phone as evidence, because in my experience, people holding phones while looking stressed must be taken seriously.
“We all have deadlines,” someone, now behind me, muttered.
“Yes, but is yours marked as high priority in red font with three exclamation points?” I asked. “I didn’t think so.”
The beauty of chaos is how quickly it spreads. Within minutes, other shoppers began declaring their own priorities. A man in yoga pants insisted his kombucha purchase couldn’t wait because Mercury was in retrograde. A woman with three kids announced that her ice cream was melting at a legally actionable rate. Someone started a priority bidding war, escalating from “urgent” to “super urgent” to “apocalyptically urgent.”
The cashier quit on the spot.
Phase Two took me to the DMV, where I explained that my license renewal was more important than everyone else’s because I had a meeting in an hour, and could they please expedite the entire bureaucratic process? When someone pointed out that they’d been waiting since morning, I simply repeated “ASAP” with increasing volume, as if it were some sort of administrative killing curse. I am, after all, me.
By Phase Three, the city was in flames. Not literal flames, but the metaphorical fires of priority warfare. Every restaurant was swamped with “rush orders.” Every doctor’s office was flooded with “urgent” appointments. The airport dissolved into a mass of people insisting their flights needed to board first because they had “priority connections.”
Society, it turns out, depends heavily on our collective agreement to wait our damn turn. I returned to my desk that afternoon, oddly satisfied. The requestor stopped by to check on their lunch order proof, which I informed them was behind sixteen other “ASAP” requests, each marked with a varying number of exclamation points. I suggested he might want to escalate it to “ASAP INFINITY,” our new highest priority level.
He stared at me for a long moment, then slowly backed away.
I like to think I taught them something that day, but who am I kidding? Tomorrow there’ll be fifteen new rush requests before noon. The only difference is that now I mentally picture each sender trying to convince their barista that their oat milk latte is a matter of national security.
Some say the world will end in fire or ice. I’m betting on a chain reaction of priority requests, each marked “URGENT!!!” And somewhere, in the smoking ruins of civilization, a document processor will be laughing.
