The Great
Gallon Heist
of 2026

Let me be clear about something upfront: I have evolved. I no longer argue with delivery drivers, university bureaucrats, or an entire nation's worth of institutional dysfunction. I file reports. I save CCTV footage. I write field notes. And occasionally, when the universe gifts me material this rich, I publish.

What follows is a completely true, fully documented account of one missing water gallon that somehow became a masterclass in everything wrong with how Indonesia operates — from a Gojek driver working under a creative alias, to a master's program director with a peculiar interest in recording the very first step of a resignation process that would then pass through approximately one million other people, to an app that celebrates delivering nothing faster than ever before. Consider this my invoice for years of unsolicited consulting work. You're welcome.

Chapter I: The Heist

It began, as all great Indonesian dramas do, with a simple grocery order. Water. Bread. A few essentials. Placed through Gojek, Indonesia's beloved delivery empire, which I have supported with the loyalty of someone who genuinely wanted to believe in local tech.

The first driver arrived. My mother received the order at the door. The Gojek app triumphantly announced delivery complete — faster than usual, actually. A personal record. The bread was wrong. The gallon of water was missing entirely. The driver, however, had apparently already awarded himself five stars in his own mind and departed with the energy of a man who had just completed an Olympic relay race.

Faster delivery. Zero accuracy. The app celebrated. The gallon did not exist. Truly a masterpiece of metric optimization over actual function.

I reordered. The second driver arrived, was perfectly professional, delivered everything correctly, and left without incident — proof that competence exists, it's just not evenly distributed. Meanwhile, the first delivery remained a mystery. Until CCTV entered the chat.

Chapter II: The CCTV Plot Twist

Security footage is a wonderful thing. It has no agenda. It does not forget. It does not claim the gallon was there when it was not. The footage from the first delivery was unambiguous: the driver arrived carrying nothing that resembled a water gallon. Not hidden. Not forgotten in the bag. Simply absent. He had completed the theatrical performance of a delivery without the minor detail of actually delivering anything.

The footage also revealed something else worth noting. The name on the Gojek app and the face on the CCTV had a complicated relationship — the kind where you're not entirely sure they've met. Operating under an alias is, to put it charitably, a data integrity problem. To put it less charitably, it is fraud, and it makes every rating, complaint log, and transaction record attached to that name statistically meaningless.

When confronted, the driver's chosen defense was to threaten me with jail for having the audacity to file a report. Bold. Innovative. Completely consistent with a pattern of behavior where the person who caused the problem aggressively positions themselves as the victim. Indonesia has truly perfected this art form.

Chapter III: An Interlude — The University

Since we are already here, documenting institutional dysfunction, allow me a brief detour to a previous chapter of my Indonesian professional life.

When I resigned from my first job, the director of the master's program asked to record our conversation. This seemed unusual — particularly because this was not even the resignation meeting. It was the opening act. The first handshake in what would become a bureaucratic relay race of extraordinary length, where one person would pass the process to another, who would pass it to another, who would pass it to another, and so on, in a chain so extended it began to feel less like an administrative procedure and more like a social experiment testing how long a person will keep chasing unresponsive strangers through an email thread before concluding that life is too short. It was a university building comprehensively equipped with CCTV cameras — the kind of institution that monitors everything and resolves nothing — and yet here was this director, personally requesting an audio recording of the ceremonial door-opening to a process that had no visible end. One can only speculate why.

Perhaps he was an enthusiastic documentarian. Perhaps he was multitasking — Indonesian institutional culture famously requires one person to attend five meetings simultaneously, which mathematically guarantees full presence at none of them. Perhaps he simply wanted to play it back later for professional development purposes, his own or someone else's. The mind wanders.

A building full of cameras, and yet someone still felt the need to personally record a resignation conversation. Redundancy is apparently a core institutional value.

What I do know is that the same institution once escalated my coffee purchase to a major meeting as though it were a line item in the national budget. The same environment produced a master's program director with the energy of a toddler in a management title and a senior staff member who delivered every statement with the confidence of someone who had never once verified what she was saying. Absolute icons. I paid my resignation penalty cheerfully. It was the most valuable exit fee I have ever spent. Consider it tuition for a masterclass in what not to build.

To that institution: you're welcome for the free organizational diagnostic. The fact that you needed one should tell you something. The fact that you probably won't act on it tells me everything.

But wait — there is a delightful epilogue to this chapter. Two days ago, out of mild curiosity, I searched my own name online without a VPN — meaning the results were served through Indonesian servers, reflecting what Indonesian authorities currently show about me. What I found was genuinely impressive in its commitment to an alternative reality.

My lecturer status — dosen, for the uninitiated — is listed as active.

Active. Present tense. Currently employed. As of May 2026. At an institution I have not set foot in since April 2022. The database and I have, apparently, very different recollections of events.

Here is what actually happened, for the record. The entire resignation process was conducted over email — not by preference, but because that is how they ran it. In person was not an option, because the people whose approval I needed were unresponsive. The process required collecting sign-offs from a hierarchy of individuals, each of whom needed to be tracked down individually over email. When one person on the chain could not be reached, I had to escalate to find an alternative. When that alternative was unclear, I had to navigate the hierarchy again — from scratch. This was their process, their team, their internal coordination failure. I was the one chasing their people through their broken chain, on my own time, after they had already stopped paying me.

The institution promised a completed resignation by end of March 2022. I, in good faith, transferred the penalty fee immediately upon receiving their calculated amount — bank transfer, same day, documented. They had the money before the deadline. What they apparently did not have was any functional coordination between the people whose signatures were required to actually close the process. No final letter arrived by end of March. None arrived in April either. I left.

They processed the bank transfer with remarkable efficiency. The exit letter, however, required institutional coordination — a skill that was, at that point, clearly not available in sufficient quantity. The contrast in response times was instructive.

The conclusion I drew was straightforward: a resignation process that collapses because their own approvers are unresponsive, their own chain is uncoordinated, and their own deadline is missed is categorically their problem. You do not get to stop paying someone, fail your own stated deadline, pocket their transfer, and then expect them to keep servicing your administrative backlog indefinitely. That is not employment. That is something else, and I declined to participate in it further.

They had never met anyone like me before — someone who pays promptly, waits patiently for the other side to honour their commitment, watches them fail to do so, and then simply leaves without drama or extended negotiation. The concept appeared to genuinely confuse them. I suspect most people in that situation keep chasing, keep apologising, keep showing up. I did not. I had places to be.

Somewhere in an Indonesian government database, there exists a version of me who never left — loyally listed as active, showing up on paper with the quiet dedication of a phantom employee who somehow missed the part where the institution stopped paying her, failed its own deadline, and left her chasing unresponsive approvers through an email chain that went nowhere. One genuinely wonders if this version has been assigned students. If she attends departmental meetings. If colleagues have noticed she has not been physically present for four years and simply assumed she works from home.

This is not a minor clerical error. An active dosen status in an Indonesian government registry carries legal weight — affecting professional records and credential documentation across any subsequent international work. The institution that could not coordinate its own approval chain across several months has somehow maintained my listing in a national database across four years. Selective efficiency, delivered with consistency.

Chapter IV: Who's Actually in the Room? A Study in Interview Theatre

The master's program director's recording request did not exist in a vacuum. It sits inside a broader Asian institutional habit of documenting candidates without their meaningful consent — and I have now experienced this pattern across enough countries to write a comparative analysis. Consider this a preview.

In Indonesia, interviews at universities are recorded. You are told. It is presented as standard procedure, delivered with the tone of someone reading terms and conditions nobody has ever read. In South Korea, this practice reaches an entirely different level of production value.

I attended a postdoctoral interview in South Korea conducted over video conference. Several individuals appeared on screen — the exact count I will not pin down precisely, somewhere between four and six, because what matters is not the number but the quality. The setup was professional. The framing was deliberate. The problem was that the majority of the panel appeared to be — and I use this term with full clinical precision — not quite real.

The video quality was off. The backgrounds had that specific artificiality of something assembled rather than inhabited. Real people in real rooms have a particular texture to their presence. Several of these did not.

— Field observation, postdoctoral interview, South Korea

Of everyone on screen, I am confident that exactly two were genuine, present, breathing participants. I could tell because they were the quieter ones — less performative, less polished, the way real people tend to be when they are not playing a role. The rest had the uncanny quality of supplementary casting, there to populate the panel and manufacture the visual impression of institutional gravity. And the professor they had specifically named in the pre-interview email — the one whose involvement was presumably meant to signal seriousness — was absent from the call entirely. Not late. Not mentioned. Simply not there.

I did not finish the interview. I assessed the situation in real time, concluded that continuing was not a productive use of anyone's afternoon, and left. The institution had invested considerable effort in assembling what appeared to be a panel. I invested considerably less effort in departing from it. I like to think we were evenly matched in our commitment to the exercise.

This is not a minor procedural difference. It reflects a fundamental disagreement about who holds power in the room — or on the screen. An institution that records without genuine consent, or worse, populates an interview panel with artificial participants to manufacture authority, is telling you something precise about how it will treat you if you join it. The performance of rigor is not rigor. The appearance of a panel is not a panel.

The master's program director who recorded that opening conversation at Binus was operating from the same instinct: documentation as control, surveillance as institutional language, the recording as leverage in a system where formal accountability does not otherwise exist. In a functional system, you do not need to personally record conversations because the formal processes are reliable. The personal recording is the tell. It means the formal processes are not.

When institutions cannot trust their own systems, they start recording everything personally. When candidates cannot trust the panel, they start counting who's real. We are all, apparently, doing forensics now.

South Korea, for what it is worth, is in a different category of dysfunction from Indonesia — more sophisticated in its dysfunction, which almost makes it worse. The fake panel required effort. Someone decided that manufacturing the appearance of a rigorous interview process was preferable to simply conducting one. That decision was made by a person with institutional authority, in an academic context, for a research position. Whatever research that institution produces, I would encourage reviewers to apply appropriate scrutiny to the methodology section.

I would like to say this was an isolated regional phenomenon. I cannot say that. Because Germany.

A separate postdoctoral interview, this time at a German university, involved two people: a postdoc interviewer and the Principal Investigator — the PI, the lab lead, the person whose name is on the grant, whose vision runs the research, and whose judgment determines whether you get the position. In a two-person interview, both participants matter. But one matters considerably more. And that one — specifically, precisely, the PI — had video quality so noticeably degraded compared to the postdoc beside them that the contrast was impossible to ignore. The postdoc came through clearly. The PI looked like a live feed from a country with different infrastructure priorities.

In any interview, the camera quality of the most important person in the room should not be the detail you remember most. And yet.

— Field observation, postdoctoral interview, Germany

To be precise: I am not claiming Germany fabricated an entire panel the way Korea appeared to. The German situation was subtler — one person, one suspicious technical discrepancy, in an otherwise straightforward two-person call. But pattern recognition is pattern recognition. When the decision-maker is consistently the least visually verifiable person in the interview — whether through absence, artificial video, or conspicuously degraded quality — a reasonable observer starts to wonder whether the interview is designed to be evaluated, or merely to evaluate. The asymmetry is notable. The candidate sits there in full resolution, readable, on the record. The PI, apparently, does not need to be.

And then there is Japan.

Japan — the country whose trains issue formal apologies for arriving ninety seconds behind schedule. The country whose culture treats punctuality not as a courtesy but as a moral value. The country where being on time is the absolute floor of professional behaviour, not a ceiling to aspire to. This context is important, because the interviewer for a postdoctoral position at a Japanese institution arrived late.

Not slightly delayed. Not joining mid-introduction with a brief apology. Late. To a scheduled interview. In Japan. The cognitive dissonance required to process this took a moment.

— Field observation, postdoctoral interview, Japan

One might expect that arriving late to an interview you are conducting would inspire a certain humility in the questions that follow. One would be wrong. The late-arriving interviewer proceeded to ask, with apparent sincerity, why the duration of my time at each institution was not particularly long. A reasonable question in isolation. Considerably less reasonable when delivered by someone whose own CV featured comparably short tenures at their own institutions — a detail I had, naturally, reviewed before the call.

I pointed this out. Calmly. Directly. With the energy of someone who had done their homework and was now simply reporting their findings back to the room. The response to this observation was not a rebuttal. It was not an acknowledgment. It was an announcement: the interviewer had another interview to attend, thanked me for my time, and disappeared from the call.

The person who arrived late to my interview left my interview early to attend another interview — after questioning my commitment to staying at institutions for sufficient periods of time. The irony was so precisely constructed it almost felt intentional. It was not intentional. That is what makes it perfect.

Korea fabricated a panel. Germany's PI had suspicious video quality. Japan's interviewer arrived late, questioned tenure, and exited mid-interview to evaluate someone else. Each country contributed something unique to what I am now formally classifying as the International Postdoctoral Interview Dysfunction Index — a body of evidence assembled not through research design, but through the simple accumulation of experience. The sample size is, at this point, statistically notable.

Chapter V: The Actual Problem with Indonesian Systems

Here is the data integrity issue that nobody wants to say plainly: if a Gojek driver operates under a false name, every data point associated with that account is corrupted. Every rating. Every complaint. Every transaction. Any researcher using Gojek's service data to study customer satisfaction, delivery reliability, or driver performance is building conclusions on a foundation of creative fiction.

I have seen Indonesia's SSCN government website. It is, charmingly, hosted on GitHub infrastructure. Simple enough to be instructive. The Binus website, similarly, is a reminder that confidence and capability are frequently unacquainted in this ecosystem. An institution can project enormous authority while operating on the technological sophistication of a school project — and everyone in the building will act as though this is unremarkable.

The Gojek app, meanwhile, has not resolved the basic complaint I filed. The feature that would flag identity discrepancies, cross-reference driver profiles, or flag suspicious delivery patterns is apparently not a priority. This is the same company whose founder was absorbed into government — presumably to apply his operational expertise to a larger system. Based on available evidence, the results are consistent.

Chapter VI: On Being Overqualified for This

I want to be precise about what I mean when I say I am overqualified for this country's nonsense — because it is not arrogance. It is arithmetic.

A PhD completed abroad. Two postdoctoral positions, also abroad. Years of operating in environments where precision is not a suggestion, where accountability is not optional, and where a delivery driver who fakes a name and threatens a customer for filing a report would face actual consequences. The contrast is not subtle.

When I returned in 2025, even the transportation to the airport was an ordeal — as though the infrastructure itself was making a point. Don't worry. I got the message.

While I was completing my degree abroad, there were pressures — some overt, some operating on a frequency I can only describe as atmospheric — encouraging a faster return. Something was being revealed, unravelling, or rearranged back home — the exact nature of it was never made clear to me, and perhaps that was intentional. What I felt was the pull. What I chose was to stay, finish, and complete the work on my own timeline without abbreviating anything. The "I don't give a damn" is not a personality quirk. It is a survival mechanism with an excellent track record.

Smart people do not repeat mistakes. Working with minimum resources, maximum bureaucracy, and a colleague pool selected for compliance rather than competence — once was educational. Twice would be a choice I cannot explain to myself. The world has better offers. I have accepted them.

Chapter VII: The Financial Independence Postscript

One underrated benefit of remaining single until now: I have never had to justify my grocery bill to anyone. I have purchased diamonds because I wanted to. Gold because I felt like it. A weekly grocery order of sufficient scale that it would, I suspect, cause cardiac events in any man who reviewed it expecting to have opinions about it.

The idea that someone else's grown son would have access to my finances, earned through years of rigorous academic work in multiple countries, is so cosmically absurd that it functions as its own punchline.

The Gojek driver, with his outstanding approach to customer service and identity management, has not improved my general outlook on the species. When I see men walking now, my brain runs a brief automatic assessment — not out of hostility, but out of the same pattern recognition that flags a suspicious delivery as suspicious. The data accumulates. The conclusions are not encouraging. I remain open to outliers. I am not holding my breath.

To any future partner the universe is potentially preparing: arrive with precision, accountability, and zero interest in my financial autonomy, or do not arrive at all. The bar is not high. It is, however, non-negotiable. I have seen what happens when standards are lowered, and I have CCTV footage of the results.

Closing Arguments

The gallon arrived eventually. I am hydrated. The evidence is filed. The one-star review is posted. This blog post exists.

Indonesia, I say this as someone who is technically still here: you have extraordinary potential that you are actively, creatively, and with remarkable consistency failing to realize. This is not pessimism. Pessimists don't bother documenting. This is the notes of someone who wanted things to work, kept detailed records of when they didn't, and has now reached the productive stage of publishing those records for the edification of whoever finds them useful.

To Gojek: fix your driver identity verification. Build real accountability into your complaint resolution. Stop sending apology templates and calling it an investigation. The consulting fee for this advice is waived. Again. Consider it a gift from a long-suffering loyal user who has now uninstalled your app.

To the first driver: the CCTV footage is retained. The report is filed. The documentation is thorough. Whatever happens next is a direct consequence of choices already made. I wish you the specific kind of growth that only comes from genuine accountability — an experience you apparently have not yet had the pleasure of.

To the master's program director with the recording hobby: I hope the audio quality was acceptable. I hope the content was useful. I paid the penalty and left the building, which tells you everything about the cost-benefit analysis.

I emerged from this saga fully hydrated, mildly entertained, and in possession of significantly better documentation than any Indonesian institution involved in this story. Against all odds and an impressive quantity of institutional stupidity — I came out on top. As usual. Class dismissed. 😎