"Recall"
Weekend Dispatch #1
Tuesday, 5:12 PM. I was about to close my laptop when Brad appeared at my desk with two coffees. Brad never brings coffee. Brad doesn’t even know where the kitchen is. Brad only trades and makes deals: he has a vendor badge.
“Hey Norm, quick question. Totally hypothetical. If someone needed to, like, remove an email from someone’s inbox before they read it... you guys from IT can do that, right?”
It is a thing IT can do. In the same way a locksmith can open your neighbor’s front door. I told Brad I wasn’t going to be the guy who gets fired so he can keep his commission. He laughed. I didn’t. He left with both coffees.
I got the full story from my boss Derek later that week.
Turns out Brad had a call with a client earlier that day. A big one — the kind where Brad puts on his “strategic partnership” voice and starts dropping names. At some point, to show just how tight he is with us, he casually mentioned Project Butterfly — which, if you haven’t heard of it, is exactly the point. Butterfly is Brittany’s baby. Still in stealth. Still lives in a SharePoint folder that says “CONFIDENTIAL” in three colors.
What Brad had forgotten is that Copilot was running. Quietly, diligently, doing the one thing we’ve been begging it to do for months: taking accurate meeting notes.
After the call, Copilot generated a beautiful summary. Well-structured. Bullet points. It even captured Brad’s exact words about Butterfly — spelled correctly, in context, with a neat little action item underneath. Then it drafted a follow-up email with the minutes attached, ready to send. All Brad had to do was review it before hitting send.
Brad only hit send.
The summary went to every attendee, including Debby. Brad found out when his contact at the client forwarded the minutes back to him with a smiley face. Then his N-1 pinged him, flagging the mention of Butterfly. That’s why Brad panicked, and came to find me with his hypothetical question and his two coffees.
As of this morning, Debby hasn’t mentioned it. Brad still works here. Could mean she didn’t read it. Could mean she read it and is saving it for the next steering committee. With Debby, silence is never reassuring.
What is sure is that Copilot is still running. Still taking some kind of notes. Still capturing some things. Whether it’s what we actually want it to — that’s a different conversation.
Norm works in IT. He has opinions. They are allegedly his own.