There is a sign in almost every workplace that counts the days since a body last failed. The number climbs. Everyone is trained to want it to climb. A high number is pride, cleanliness, a good record, a photograph for the annual report. But the only mechanism that ever returns the counter to zero is that a body finally stopped cooperating, and that person was sent home. Read the other way, the sign does not measure safety. It measures how long everyone has stayed intact enough to keep being required to show up. The joke about faking an injury so they will send you home is not about laziness. It is about noticing which key fits this door. You cannot leave because you are exhausted. Exhaustion is not an admissible category. Refusal is not a category. Only damage is legible; only a broken body is a valid exit document. So the healthy worker who wants out has to counterfeit the one currency the system accepts. The digit on the wall keeps rising, and each rising day is another day nobody's body broke in the correct, readable way. Zero is the only number on that sign that means someone got to go. —