For anyone who hasn’t seen “The Truman Show”: it’s a story about a man who lives inside a perfect illusion. His entire life is a TV set. The town, the neighbors, even his wife and coworkers… all actors. They know it’s fake. They get paid to keep the illusion running so Truman never realizes the truth.
The employees in Truman’s world were enablers.
They smiled on cue, stuck to the script, and did whatever it took to keep the show believable. Not because they believed in it, but because it was their job. Because it paid the bills.
Sound familiar?
For years, that’s what we, Xerox employees, have done here.
We’ve watched the numbers collapse, the debt balloon, the rhetoric pile up… and we’ve kept performing.
We’ve called decline “transformation,” losses “investments,” and chaos “reinvention”.
We’ve applauded speeches that we knew were hollow, because the alternative was uncomfortable truth.
We weren’t fooled. We were complicit.
Now the walls of the set are falling down.
Let’s stop pretending we didn’t know. We all knew.
We saw the numbers slide quarter after quarter.
We sat through the town halls, clapped like it mattered, then went back to our desks to whisper the obvious: this company’s been dead for years; we’re just managing the c0rpse.
Why?
Because the salary was decent.
Because it was easier to play d-mb than to stand up and say the emperor had no clothes.
Because survival inside a dying machine feels safer than the uncertainty outside it.
Every spreadsheet, every “adjusted” margin, every fake pep talk… we saw it all.
And instead of calling it out, we became the extras in the show.
We smiled, nodded, and sold the illusion that Xerox was turning a corner.
But the truth is brutal: we helped build the illusion.
We traded everything for comfort, and comfort is what leads companies to de4th.
We knew the business model was obsolete, that “Reinvention” was just branding without any substance.
We heard the excuses: tariffs, macroeconomy, delayed orders, COVID (in 2025?)… and pretended those were answers.
Now the curtain’s down.
No plot twist, no surprise ending… just the arithmetic of brutal financials that don’t lie.
The problem isn’t that management lied: the real problem is that we let them.
We built a culture where truth was optional and optimism mandatory.
We rewarded obedience over thinking.
Every time we clapped at jargon, every time we stayed silent while the company hollowed out, we helped build the lie.
Now there’s nothing left to hide behind.
The show’s over.
Stop clapping.