Hi, I’m Laura.

I’m an HR technology professional, recovering Classics major, and, most recently, workplace archaeologist.

I’ve spent most of my career digging through HR systems trying to answer questions like:

Why was this configured this way?

Who asked for this?

What does this calculated field actually do?

Why does the documentation end abruptly in 2019?

Eventually, it occurred to me that this is not terribly different from archaeology.

You find the remains of a civilization you did not personally witness. You examine the artifacts they left behind. You develop theories about how they lived and what they believed. And occasionally you discover a spreadsheet called FINAL_FINAL_v3_USE_THIS_ONE.xlsx and realize some mysteries may never be solved.

Fortunately, I also have a degree in Classics, which means I spent several years studying ancient civilizations before accidentally building a career studying the ruins of HR technology implementations.

Ancient Workplaces is where those two extremely marketable areas of expertise finally meet.

Here, I investigate thousands of years of organizational dysfunction: ancient requirements gathering, Roman bureaucracy, stakeholder hieroglyphics, legacy systems, mysterious business processes, workplace artifacts, and compelling archaeological evidence that someone has been saying “we’ve always done it this way” since approximately 3000 BCE.

Some of it is HR technology. Some of it is history. Most of it is workplace satire.

All of it supports my central scholarly thesis:

The technology changes. The workplace does not.