Larry D. King (not that Larry King) wrote a series of letters about Confusion Central while he was working at InformationWeek.

One began: “If you think of yourself as endlessly shoveling coal down a chute–i.e., copy onto the desk–I am the chute endlessly transporting coal. You assume the chute needs coal; I assume the coal must go somewhere. Beyond that, we cannot say what purpose we serve, where the cycle begins or ends. Where does the coal come from? Where does it go? Is it used for anything? Is it perhaps the same coal, sliding down the chute and back onto the pile from which you shovel, so that I merely serve as the means by which you can continue to enable me to serve as the means by which you continue?”