“Blameless engineering postmortems for awkward social interactions. Every cringe is an incident. Every silence is a SEV-2. Five Whys, action items, owner assignments, lessons learned. By Monday standup, the team has grown.”
The Problem
You said the thing. The room went quiet. Your friend looked at you. The waiter laughed politely and left. Nobody acknowledged it. You went home and replayed it 1,400 times with zero structured learnings. You shipped the same bug at brunch on Sunday.
The Solution
After every social interaction, our on-call coordinator (you, drunk on the Uber home) files an incident. By 9am, a blameless postmortem is auto-generated. Timeline reconstructed. Root cause identified. Action items assigned. The responsible party (also you) is notified in Slack.
Incident Dashboard · last 7 days
7 incidents · 2 SEV-1 · MTTR: 3 days of overthinking
INC-0418
SEV-1
Said “you too” in response to “I love you.”
Mon 11:47 PM · bedroom · impact: total
INC-0419
SEV-1
Waved at a stranger who was waving at the person behind me.
Tue 8:14 AM · subway · impact: identity
INC-0420
SEV-2
Laughed at the part of the story that was not the joke.
Wed 7:32 PM · dinner · impact: vibes
INC-0421
SEV-2
Brought up CrossFit, unprompted, to a vegan.
Thu 1:10 PM · lunch · impact: alliance
INC-0422
SEV-3
Asked the barista “how’s your day” while she was crying.
Fri 9:02 AM · cafe · impact: emotional
INC-0423
SEV-3
Over-shared trauma to a Tinder date during chip selection.
Fri 7:48 PM · tacos · impact: pacing
INC-0424
SEV-4
Said “happy birthday” to a man at his retirement party.
Sat 6:30 PM · backyard · impact: low
uptime: 91.4% · error budget: depletedpaged by: my own brain at 3am
The Five Whys
Every SEV-1 gets a full Five Whys analysis, generated overnight. Below is a redacted excerpt from INC-0418. The team takes this very seriously.
INC-0418 · Five Whysfacilitator: therapist@you.dev
Why 1
Why did I say “you too”?
→ Because my mouth shipped before my brain merged.
Why 2
Why did my mouth ship first?
→ Reflex from years of waiter interactions. Same code path.
Why 3
Why is the code path shared?
→ Premature abstraction in 2009. Never refactored.
Why 4
Why hasn’t it been refactored?
→ No one filed a ticket. Also: avoidance.
Why 5
Why the avoidance?
→ We’re going to need a longer postmortem.
Root causeInsufficient input validation on social tokens of affection. Single point of failure: the entire personality.
Action Items
Every postmortem ships with action items, owners, and ETAs. Owners are always you. ETAs are aspirational.
Action Items · 5 openP0: 1 · P1: 2 · P2: 2
P0
Add unit test: distinguish “I love you” from “enjoy your meal.”
@you
this week
P1
Deprecate the CrossFit anecdote across all environments.
@you
Q3
P1
Implement rate limit on trauma-sharing (max 1 / first date).
@you
next date
P2
Add observability: did anyone laugh, or were they being polite?
@you
ongoing
P2
Document the “happy birthday”/retirement edge case in the runbook.
@you
someday
Pricing
$0
1 postmortem / wk. You write it yourself in the Notes app at 2am. It still counts.
$29 / mo
Unlimited incidents. AI-drafted timelines. Five Whys facilitator. PagerDuty integration to your group chat.
$299 / mo
Dedicated reliability engineer (your therapist). Quarterly chaos engineering (a planned awkward dinner). 99.9% uptime SLA on your personality.
TAM
Total addressable cringe
4.1B adults × ~3 incidents/wk × $29 ARPU
= $1.4T / yr
Excludes weddings, which are a single sustained SEV-1 with catering.
The Ask
$5M seed for: 3 reliability engineers, 1 incident commander (former hostage negotiator), 1 ex-Google SRE who will lose her mind, and a PagerDuty enterprise contract billed to your prefrontal cortex.
Series A pitch:“We’re Datadog, but the service is you and the alerts never stop.”
This postmortem is blameless. Except for INC-0421. That one was on you.