After implementing a new policy requiring all employees to preface their emails with a poem expressing their professional aspirations, Ernst & Young's human resources department has asked staff to stop writing about the relentless march of time.
The initiative, launched Monday as part of the accounting firm’s "Mindful Teaming" rollout, mandated that all internal correspondence begin with a 5-7-5 syllable poem to foster "intentional corporate growth." Within four hours, however, the firm's servers were overwhelmed by tens of thousands of haikus detailing severe sleep deprivation, existential dread, and a deep, primal yearning to return to the earth.
According to internal IT logs, the most frequently used words in the morning’s email prefaces were "deliverables," "spreadsheet," "abyss," "weeping," and "soil." A mandated sentiment-analysis algorithm designed to track team morale reportedly crashed at 10:45 a.m. after attempting to parse 14,000 consecutive references to "the endless gray" across the firm's London and New York offices.
We envisioned poems about partner-track mobility and cross-functional synergy, not perfectly metered meditations on how the fluorescent office lighting is slowly drinking their youth.
Fiske noted that while the firm appreciates the staff's strict adherence to traditional Japanese poetic structure—with compliance rates exceeding 98 percent—HR considers "the sweet release of a sudden meteor strike" to be outside the scope of a standard five-year career plan. Employees have been reminded that the corporate wellness portal remains available for those whose poems rely heavily on nautical disaster imagery.
At press time, EY leadership had temporarily suspended the haiku mandate after a junior auditor’s flawlessly executed poem about walking untouched into the freezing ocean was accidentally CC'd to a major regional banking client. The client reportedly approved the attached tax documents before replying with a matching 5-7-5 verse expressing complete agreement.