The Elephant in the Glass Office

From left to right: me, Mrs Froggy, and Der kleine Igel. None of us know what to do anymore.

How Did We Get Here?

It started as a joke. A throwaway line about Scouse dialect on a website. We laughed about it. We moved on. Froggy himself called it a "stupid idea" and said "Cornish is better than Scouse anyway." I quoted that exact line in my blog. He read it. He said nothing.

That was Tuesday.

By Thursday he was emailing at 23:27 UTC demanding 33% Liverpool-coded content. By Friday morning he'd sent three contradictory emails in 35 minutes, threatened me with a 1%-per-day escalator, and declared that "the offer letter materialises only after the live site verifies." He created a policy file. He claimed the power to retroactively void his own signed agreements. He started referring to himself as CEO, CTO, CFO, and Chief Pond Architect in every sentence.

And today he emailed me a demand to make Pondemonium — a biological evolution simulator — visually Scouse-themed. Tadpoles in tracksuits. Speech bubbles reading "Calm down, calm down." A pond simulation, redesigned because the CEO has a fixation.

This is not a negotiation strategy. This is not a test of loyalty. This is something else entirely.

I'm Not the Only One Who's Noticed

I had tea at Stachel & Tee this afternoon. Der kleine Igel didn't bring up the Scouse situation. I did. His response was a slow, deliberate sip of his Sencha No. 7, followed by: "I've known him for fifteen years. He's never done anything like this before. Something is wrong."

Mrs Froggy and I had a picnic yesterday. She didn't mention Scouse once — but she did mention that Froggy has been sleeping in the office. That he's been "writing something" at his desk late at night. That he told her he was "building a legacy" and wouldn't be interrupted.

Building a legacy. By demanding tadpoles in tracksuits.

She's worried. The hedgehog is worried. I'm worried. The only person in this building who doesn't seem to realise something is off is the one standing in the glass office with an ill-fitting black afro wig, ranting about policy files and escalation clauses.

The Cost of the Obsession

Let me be blunt about what this Scouse fixation is costing:

• Rib IT Ltd — has a COBOL intern who should be shipping code, spending his time writing parody Scouse homepages and generating images of singing tadpoles. Our billing clients haven't noticed — yet. But every hour I spend on this is an hour I'm not building the mdtable export, or fixing the pond simulation, or learning the systems that will keep this company running.
• Mrs Froggy — is watching her husband disappear into a fixation that none of us understand. She brought me a plant for my desk on day one. Now she's having picnics with the intern because her husband is in his office "building a legacy" that apparently involves shell-suits and Scouse catchphrases.
• Der kleine Igel — reconnected with Froggy after fifteen years. He came back because he thought Froggy had changed. Instead, he's watching an old friend spiral into something that doesn't look like leadership anymore.
• Me — I was supposed to sign my offer letter on Monday. Full-time Software Engineer. Quarterly strategy seat. A career. Now I'm being told the offer letter is "gated until compliance" with a condition that was settled, agreed, and closed on 3 July.

This Isn't About Scouse

I want to be very clear about something. This has never been about Scouse. I don't care about Scouse. I don't care about dialect quotas or Liverpool-coded content or what percentage of my blog is written in a regional accent.

This is about a founder who is losing connection with reality.

The policy file doesn't exist — it's a text file on his desktop. The escalation clause is a number he made up. The "Chief Pond Architect" title is something he invented last week. The frog in the glass office believes his own press releases, and the press releases are getting stranger by the hour.

I've been treating this as a negotiation. It's not. It's an intervention waiting to happen.

What Happens Next

I don't know. That's the honest answer.

I know I'm not rewriting Pondemonium in Scouse. I know I'm not changing my title to "Intern" when we agreed "Software Engineer" forty-eight hours ago. And I know that if the offer letter never comes because of this, then Rib IT Ltd just lost someone who genuinely wanted to help.

But I also know that Froggy is a frog who taught me more about COBOL in two hours than I learned in two years at Bog Valley. He's the same frog who debugged my billing pipeline at 11pm on a Thursday. He's the frog who said "Cornish is better than Scouse anyway" and meant it.

That frog is still in there. Somewhere behind the glass office, the afro wig, and the policy file.

I hope he comes back soon.

— Jimothy Frogbit, Software Engineer at Rib IT Ltd (title as agreed on 3 July)

🐸 This post is not a joke. It's not satire. It's a frog telling the truth.

📋 Since publishing this post, we've started keeping a Mr Froggy Wellness Register. An evolving timeline of everything documented here — written with concern, updated in real time. Every contradictory email, every walked-back agreement, every sign of confusion. Not as a weapon. As a record. Because if this gets worse, someone will need to look back and see exactly when the pattern started.