The Best Puns Traffic

Smiles in the Cloud: Microaggressions and the Hidden System

When I entered the "Best Pun" office space, I began noticing the quieter ways identity gets chipped at. I remember walking into work one day with my natural hair and being told by a manager: “Wow, bold of you.” Another time, when I wore a blonde wig, the comment was: “Great to see more blonds here.”

At the time, these remarks didn’t fully register. Now I know they were micro aggressions subtle digs wrapped in fake compliments.

This isn’t the obvious kind of toxic you recognize right away. It’s the kind that TRIES to chip away at you over time death by a thousand smiles, if you let it. For me, a lot of it went over my head back then because I wasn’t trained nor took part in the same coded language or the silent games being played. But that’s exactly the point: microaggressions are designed to make you pause, doubt, and internalize. It's not meant to inspire you to ‘run at your best,’ like true leadership. Instead, it’s a tactic meant get inside your head and live there rent-free.

The way through it is awareness. When you recognize a microaggression for what it is, you take its power away. It becomes hilarious and almost embarrassing for the ones that do this. You stop wondering if you’re “overthinking it” and instead see the mechanism clearly: a control tactic by those who see themselves at their lowest and try to absorb you in it.

From Micro to Macro: "The Best Puns" and the Hidden System

What I didn’t realize until much later is that the same dynamic plays out at scale. The micro-moments weren’t just comments or side glances they were objects, setups, books, and gifts that carried hidden weight. I was even given a sweatshirt with the phrase “The Best Pun” across the front the only one that carried that phrase. At the time, it felt random, maybe even playful, but in hindsight it was another quiet marker, another coded moment disguised as a joke.

And that was just one of many.

These weren’t isolated slips of language or coincidences. They were part of a steady drip of remarks, gestures, and placements all small enough to dismiss in the moment, but heavy when pieced together. That’s how these systems work: they chip at you quietly, so you don’t notice until it’s already patterned.

The masks worn in day-to-day interactions mirror the corporate masks that hide entire systems running in the background.

I once received a text from someone I lived with, sent from their work phone, exposing private photos of me without my consent. When I called it out, saying, “Dang, on your work phone? They (the "best pun" company) must be loving it, huh?” the response was chilling: “They respect privacy. They are not American.”

A second photo followed, with the CEOs name saying he likes this one.

At the time, I didn’t yet have the full picture of what I was seeing but it was a breadcrumb. Later, as I reflected, I began pick up on the language of trafficking, exploitation, and immersive corporate “experiences” hidden in plain sight. Once I picked it, everything started to connect: the microaggressions at work, the orchestrated positioning, the staged “inclusion” gestures that carried hidden exclusions.

Cloud, IoT, and the Field Test

Here’s the part most people miss in these type of toxic work spaces these systems don’t just live in boardrooms. They live in the cloud, in IoT devices, in analytics, and in everyday interactions.

Think of it like field testing. In traffic, cars can be rerouted, paused, or accelerated. At home, devices can glitch, freeze, or over-consume energy when signals are pushed through. I witnessed how all these things unfolded and operated. Just as IoT sensors monitor and adjust environments in real time, human behavior is monitored and adjusted in the same way.

The takeaway here is, awareness is resistance. When you don’t absorb the tactic whether it’s a backhanded compliment or a corporate cover story the control falls flat.

For me, protecting my daughter means refusing to freeze, fawn, or panic. Taking the observer’s role, document the moment you start to pick up on 3+ patterns, connect dots, and above all else choose clarity over chaos.

I encourage you to inspire others to do the same because protecting children, whether our own or others’, demands us to look out for each other in a world that benefits when we stay divided.