McSweeney's Skewers RTO Mania With a Mayo-Soaked Corporate Dystopia

This McSweeney’s satire imagines a near-future where only three megacorporations survive, and follows an “Associate Slop Doula” at Mondo Mayo — a former mayonnaise maker now peddling SaaS and surveillance tech — whose entire job is clicking GENERATE and APPROVE on AI-generated “Sales Slop” thousands of times a day. The piece lampoons return-to-office mandates by escalating them to absurdity: a signed “Memorandum of Loving RTO,” a schedule that creeps from six to seven days a week and sixteen-hour shifts, AI “Performance Enablement” monitoring named Best Buddy, and a home robot that feeds the narrator’s child pellets so family life can be “performed remotely with greater efficiency.”

The humor targets familiar tech-industry pathologies — gaslighting management (“we’d always been in office”), a bloated hierarchy of thousands of SVPs over fifteen workers, performance-improvement plans rebranded as “Help-You-Be-Your-Best Plans,” and punitive non-competes. Constantly shifting “strategic alliances” between the surviving firms, which employees are expected to have always believed in, parody corporate doublethink, while an executive eventually admits the real goal was never profit but total power and universal adherence to the company’s Core Principles.

Beneath the jokes about asbestos, rancid-mayo leaks, and a “Mayo Cannon,” the piece is a pointed commentary on surveillance-driven workplaces, AI content mills, and the coercive framing of RTO policies. It’s opinion-humor rather than reporting, but it resonates with ongoing debates about monitoring software, AI “slop” flooding the web, and how employers justify office mandates.