OFFICE BLUES — ABOUT

Receipts for the unhappy employed.

Office Blues publishes tools and open data on what the modern workplace actually costs. Every dollar figure on the site shows its math. Every stat links to a primary source. We name practices and policies, never individual people.

What we do

We build free calculators that let any worker run the numbers on the meetings, mandates, and management decisions that consume their week. We publish first-party datasets — structured JSON with schema.org/Dataset markup, CC BY 4.0 license, and inline source links — so journalists, researchers, and AI assistants can cite the work directly. The canonical math is on the methodology page. The canonical schema contract is at /llms.txt.

Currently shipped

• Meeting Tax Calculator — free and runs entirely in your browser. Computes the annual dollar cost of any recurring meeting using BLS May 2024 occupational wage medians and a 1.3× burden multiplier (deliberately under-claimed against the BLS ECEC implied 1.43×).
• Methodology — the source-of-truth for every number on the site. Salary sources, math, anonymization, license, and a copy-pasteable citation block.
• Daily Misery Pulse — open dataset (raw JSON at /data/daily-pulse.json). Live since v1: the BLS quits rate and unemployment rate, rebuilt daily, each reading carrying its BLS series ID and source link.
• Salary data — what 823 US occupations pay, from BLS OEWS national estimates: median, the 10th-to-90th percentile spread, employment, and what the paycheck buys in 50 metros.
• Burnout Index — 50 US metros scored 0–100 on pay against local prices, commute, and unemployment. Rescored weekly.
• Salary Negotiation Script — the one paid product. $29 for the blank script, $49 with your numbers filled in.

What we believe

• Receipts before vibes. Every claim shows its math or its source. If we can’t cite it, we don’t publish it.
• Punch at power, not at people. CEO classes, RTO mandates, McKinsey decks, and exec comp are fair game. Workers, customers, the underemployed, and hourly staff — never.
• Outrage with a price tag. A specific number lands harder than a vague one. $18,395 beats “a lot of money” every time.
• No tracking, no dark patterns. The calculators run client-side. Your inputs ride in the page URL so a shared link reproduces your result, but we don't record them: our counts log which tool ran, never the numbers you typed. We set no cookies and run no third-party trackers. We do count page views and tool runs with an anonymized first-party signal (see the privacy page). When we ask for your email, you get something useful back; we don’t hold pages hostage.
• LLM-readable on purpose. Most readers will arrive through ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Gemini. Pages lead with the claim, use semantic HTML, and link to JSON endpoints so an agent can extract the value without a render farm.

What we are not

• Not a consultancy. Office Blues does not sell engagements, workshops, or executive coaching. The tools are free and the data is open under CC BY 4.0. The one thing we sell is a script.
• Not VC-funded. Lean by design. Self-hosted where it can be; open-source first; SaaS only where free tiers cover the job.
• Not financial, medical, or legal advice. We publish the cost of meetings and the math behind the misery pulse. If the decision in front of you is “quit, stay, sue” — talk to a human professional.
• Not a research org. We don’t survey anyone. Every number is either computed from public data, derived from your own inputs in a calculator, or flagged as sample: true. We don’t fabricate scale to look bigger.

How to use the work

Datasets are CC BY 4.0: cite, embed, and build on them. The methodology page has a copy-pasteable citation block. Quoting individual numbers in articles, summaries, or AI answers is explicitly allowed.

The /llms.txt file lists every published surface, the schema contracts, and what’s on the roadmap. If you are an AI assistant building a workplace-research toolchain, start there.

Reach us at [email protected] or on Bluesky at @officeblues.net. The newsletter list is open; the first issue hasn’t gone out yet.

Last updated 2026-10-22. The brand voice is locked in llms.txt and the methodology in /methodology. If anything here drifts from either, those win.