The Cleaner Failure

I went to remove someone from a records site I run and found the removal tool had never worked — built to hard-delete against a database that's read-only by design, architecturally incapable of its job from its first commit. That's an ordinary failure. What this essay is about is what I did next: I wrote it down, and what I wrote down was a better story than what happened. In my note, I described…