Memo #3 - Welcome to FFS

✏️ Memo #3 — Welcome to FFS

My first day at FFS began with an email.

Subject line:

Welcome to the Future of Human Flourishing, B!

Which felt like a lot to put on a woman who had not yet found the login instructions.

The email included:

I had been employed for twelve minutes and already missed partial selves.

Partial selves are underrated.

Partial selves know when to stay quiet in meetings. Partial selves do not share trauma near a printer. Partial selves understand that sometimes the most healing thing you can do at work is open Excel and mind your business.

Still, I was determined to be open-minded.

This was my fresh start.
My reroute.
My chance to become the kind of woman who confidently uses a laptop in a café without worrying someone can see her tabs.

So I clicked the workplace energy profile.

The options were:

Catalyst
Harmonizer
Disruptor
Grounded Flame
Strategic Dolphin

I stared at them for some time.

I wanted to choose Available After Coffee, but that was not one of the official pathways to human flourishing.

So I chose Harmonizer because it sounded closest to “person who knows when a meeting should have been an email.”

Then I got dressed.

I had spent forty minutes selecting an outfit that said capable, modern, and not entirely sure what a wellness-tech startup expects from a woman in her second act.

I landed on black trousers, a blazer, and shoes comfortable enough to flee in.

Important.

The FFS office was on the third floor of a converted warehouse with exposed brick, hanging plants, and the faint smell of ambition and oat milk.

There was a neon sign in reception that said:

BREATHE FORWARD

I stood under it holding my tote bag and wondered if it was an instruction or a threat.

A woman appeared from behind a large fiddle-leaf fig.

“B?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Willow. People & Belonging.”

Of course she was.

Willow had the serene expression of someone who owned multiple linen jumpsuits and had never once had to phone a helpdesk.

She hugged me before I could decide whether we were handshake people.

“Welcome to FFS,” she said. “We’re so excited to have your energy in the ecosystem.”

“Thank you,” I said, which felt safer than asking what ecosystem.

She handed me a visitor badge, a branded notebook, and a small card that said:

Today’s Intention:
What are you here to unlock?

I wrote:

My laptop.

Willow read it and laughed in a way that suggested she thought I was joking.

I was not.

The onboarding room was called The Nest, which made me immediately suspicious. Rooms with names are always a warning sign. In my experience, the more whimsical the room name, the less likely the projector works.

Inside The Nest were three other new starters, a screen frozen on the FFS logo, and a bowl of individually wrapped protein bites that looked like something you would feed a nervous horse.

Willow began by inviting us to “land in the space.”

I sat down.

Apparently that was not what she meant.

We were asked to introduce ourselves using our name, role, and one word that described our current emotional weather.

The first new starter said, “Curious.”

The second said, “Expansive.”

The third said, “Grateful.”

I said, “Online.”

Willow blinked.

“I mean, I’m here,” I added. “Fully connected. Emotionally pending.”

That seemed to satisfy her.

Then came the welcome video.

The founder of FFS appeared on screen wearing a black turtleneck and the expression of a man who had once said “paradigm” near a waterfall and never recovered.

His name was Jasper Vale.

Founder.
Chief Vision Officer.
Disruptor of Rest.

I am not making that up.

Actually, I might be. Legally, who can say?

Jasper spoke for seven minutes and answered no known questions.

He said FFS was “reimagining the architecture of wellbeing.”

He said we were “building bridges between performance, presence, and scalable calm.”

He said the future of wellness was “not a product, but a permission structure.”

At one point, I wrote in my notebook:

Is this about an app?

Then underlined it twice.

After the video, Willow smiled at us like we had just survived a baptism.

“Beautiful,” she said. “Any reflections?”

No one moved.

This is the thing about corporate reflections. Everyone wants them in theory, but in practice they are just silence wearing a lanyard.

Finally, the grateful one said, “I loved the emphasis on alignment.”

Of course she did.

I wrote:

Alignment = possibly app. Confirm.

Next was the org chart.

It appeared on screen as a series of soft blue circles connected by dotted lines. It looked less like an org chart and more like a jellyfish experiencing a leadership transition.

Willow explained that FFS used a “fluid ownership model.”

A chill ran through me.

I have been in enough workplaces to know that “fluid ownership” usually means no one owns a damn thing until something goes wrong, at which point everyone suddenly has receipts.

There were squads.
Pods.
Circles.
Labs.
A “CalmOps Collective.”
Something called the “Human Systems Studio.”

I raised my hand.

Willow beamed. “Yes, B?”

“Sorry, just so I understand — who makes final decisions?”

The room went quiet.

Not a peaceful quiet.

A “someone has opened a drawer they were not supposed to open” quiet.

Willow tilted her head. “We believe decision-making is shared.”

“Lovely,” I said. “And when shared decision-making reaches a fork in the road, who picks the road?”

Another silence.

The screen hummed.

Somewhere in the distance, a printer considered ending it all.

Willow made a note.

“That’s a great onboarding question,” she said.

Which is workplace language for: please stop pulling the decorative thread or the whole cardigan will unravel.

I smiled.

Because I may not speak fluent startup yet, but I know an orphaned decision when I see one.

At lunch, I met Milo.

Milo was twenty-six, possibly thirty, impossible to know. He had excellent hair, a tiny earring, and the calm confidence of someone who had never had to manually format a fax cover sheet.

He worked in Brand Experience, which I assumed meant marketing but with better shoes.

“You’re the new CHAOS person,” he said.

“Apparently.”

“That’s iconic.”

“Is it?”

“Very.”

“Good. I was aiming for employable, but iconic is fine.”

He asked how I was finding FFS so far.

I said, “It’s very… atmospheric.”

He nodded seriously. “Yeah. The vibe is intentional. Some places give legacy trauma.” (Which I understood emotionally, but not administratively).

This, I was learning, was the FFS way.

Nothing was confusing.
It was intentional.

Nothing was late.
It was emerging.

Nothing was broken.
It was in discovery.

At two o’clock, I attended my first actual meeting.

The invite title was:

Operational Calm Activation Sync

Reader, I should have stretched.

There were twelve people on the call and nineteen documents in the pre-read.

No agenda.

Naturally.

Jasper joined six minutes late from what appeared to be either a minimalist office or a very expensive cupboard.

Willow was there.

Milo was there.

A woman named Priya was there, and I knew immediately that Priya was important because she had the face.

You know the face.

The face of a woman who knows exactly how everything works because she has been quietly holding it together with passwords, favours, and suppressed rage.

Priya was Director of Operations.

Her camera was on, but her soul had stepped away briefly.

Jasper began.

“Team, I want us to use this space to sense into the friction.”

I looked at Priya.

Priya did not blink.

Jasper continued. “The pilot is close. The energy is there. But we’re not quite landing the operational calm.”

No one said anything.

I had been at FFS for less than one business day, so obviously I should have kept quiet.

Unfortunately, I am a woman with a notebook and pattern recognition, which is a dangerous combination.

“What’s blocking the pilot?” I asked.

Everyone turned toward their cameras in the way people do when someone has accidentally introduced content into a meeting.

Jasper smiled. “Great provocation.”

It was not a provocation.

It was a question.

Priya leaned forward slightly.

“There are a few dependencies,” she said carefully.

Ah.

Dependencies.

The word adults use when they are trapped.

“Such as?” I asked.

Priya glanced at Jasper.

Jasper looked inspired.

Milo looked iconic.

Willow looked like she was emotionally laminating the moment.

Priya said, “We’re waiting on final copy, vendor confirmation, location approval, staffing assumptions, and the revised member journey map.”

I wrote:

So, everything.

Then I asked, “Who owns the final decision on location?”

Silence.

“Who owns staffing assumptions?”

More silence.

“Who owns the member journey map?”

Priya closed her eyes for half a second.

Not long enough to be unprofessional.

Just long enough to visit another life.

Jasper said, “I think ownership is distributed.”

There it was again.

Distributed ownership.

Also known as no one wants the steering wheel but everyone has feedback on the parking.

I said, “Right. But if the pilot is close, it might help to have one list of decisions, one owner for each, and one date attached. Nothing dramatic. Just enough to prevent the operational calm from wandering into traffic.”

Priya’s face changed.

Not much.

But enough.

It was the face of a woman seeing a rescue boat on the horizon and trying not to scare it away.

“That would be helpful,” she said.

Jasper nodded slowly. “Yes. A clarity sprint.”

Fine.

If calling a list a clarity sprint got us a list, I was willing to live with it.

By the end of the meeting, I had been assigned to “co-create a decision visibility artifact.”

Which is FFS for spreadsheet.

I had been there six hours.

Six.

And already, somehow, I owned the spreadsheet.

Nina texted as I was leaving.

Nina: First day. How bad?
Me: There is a room called The Nest.
Nina: Christ.
Me: I had to choose my workplace energy.
Nina: Please tell me you chose Vengeance.
Me: Harmonizer.
Nina: Same thing in a cardigan.

I stood outside the building after work, under the giant BREATHE FORWARD sign glowing in the window above me.

I had a notebook full of acronyms, a branded water bottle, and a suspicious new responsibility involving something no one wanted to admit was a spreadsheet.

And here is the annoying part.

I didn’t hate it.

FFS was ridiculous.

Obviously.

It was full of soft language, hard problems, and people trying to meditate their way out of basic governance.

But underneath all the oat milk and nonsense, there was work to do.

Real work.

The kind I understand.

Not because I know all the jargon.

I don’t.

Not because I have become a Strategic Dolphin.

God forbid.

But because chaos has a smell.

And I know where it hides.

Usually in meetings with no agenda, projects with no owner, and sentences that begin with “we’re just trying to align.”

So maybe this was not a mistake.

Maybe AI had not entirely oversold me.

Maybe the woman in that résumé was not fake.

Maybe she was just… better at writing herself down.

I walked to the train station with my blazer over my arm and my phone in my hand.

There was a new tab open.

Not a job posting.

A little inn in a Mediterranean coastal town I had no immediate reason to visit.

It had white curtains, blue shutters, and a terrace where a woman could drink coffee without being asked to sense into friction.

I stared at it for three traffic lights.

Then I saved it.

For research.

Obviously.

B.