Goh Ling Yong : The Slack Channel Where My Father Is Still Online - Goh Ling Yong
The dot was green.
It was a Tuesday afternoon, the kind of grey, listless day where time seems to ooze instead of pass. I was deep in a spreadsheet, wrestling with a formula that refused to cooperate, when my eyes flickered to the sidebar in Slack. To my team channel, my project channel, and then, to the list of direct messages. And that’s where I saw it. A name, and next to it, a small, solid green circle. Active.
The name was my father’s.
For a moment, my brain refused to process the information. It was like seeing a car drive backward on the highway—a simple impossibility that short-circuited all logic. My heart gave a painful thud against my ribs. I leaned closer to the screen, squinting, as if a different angle might correct the error. But it was still there. Bright, cheerful, and utterly wrong.
My father had been dead for two years.
The first thing I did was send a message to my brother. A frantic, typo-riddled string of text. You won't believe this. Dad is online on Slack.
His reply was almost instant. What? Send me a screenshot.
I did. The little green dot glowed on his screen just as it did on mine. We cycled through the rational explanations. Had his account been hacked? Was it a glitch in the system? The truth, when we pieced it together, was more mundane and somehow more heartbreaking.
My father was an engineer, a man who believed in systems, order, and redundancy. His home office, a small room tucked away at the back of the house, was his sanctuary. After he passed, my mother couldn’t bring herself to touch it. It remained exactly as he’d left it: schematics pinned to a corkboard, calipers resting by a monitor, and his old work laptop, a chunky Lenovo ThinkPad, sitting in its docking station. He had configured it, years ago, to never sleep. To always be ready. The company he’d worked for had gone under shortly before his diagnosis, and in the chaos, his user account was never deactivated.
The laptop was still plugged in. The Wi-Fi router was still on. And so, my father was still online. A digital ghost haunting the machine, his presence reduced to a single green pixel indicating a connection that no longer existed.
For the first few weeks, I tried to ignore it. Every time I opened Slack, I would consciously avert my eyes from the bottom of my DMs list. Seeing his name there felt like picking at a wound that had just begun to scar over. It was a constant, silent reminder of the void he’d left. His digital presence felt like a cruel joke, an echo in an empty room.
Grief is a strange landscape. You think you’ve mapped it, learned its contours, and then you stumble into a hidden canyon. The green dot was my canyon. It wasn’t the grand, sweeping grief of the funeral or the first birthday without him. It was a quiet, persistent, everyday grief. A tiny, glowing reminder of a massive absence.
Then one day, something shifted. I was working on a small woodworking project in my garage, trying to build a simple bookshelf. The miter joint just wouldn't line up. I grew frustrated, ready to throw the piece of pine across the room. In that moment, I knew exactly what my father would have said. Measure twice, cut once, Ling Yong. And for God’s sake, check if your saw is square.
His voice was so clear in my head, a mix of patience and mild exasperation. Without thinking, I pulled out my phone, opened Slack, and navigated to our direct message. The green dot was there, waiting. My thumbs hovered over the keyboard. It felt insane. It felt blasphemous. I did it anyway.
The miter cut is off. I think the saw blade isn't square. How do I true it up?
I hit send. The message appeared in the chat window, marked as ‘read’ almost instantly—because, of course, the application was open on his laptop two hundred miles away. For a second, the rational part of my brain screamed at the absurdity. But then, a profound sense of calm washed over me. I hadn't expected an answer from him. I had just needed to ask the question.
In my mind, I could hear his reply. He’d walk me through it, telling me to get my combination square, to check the blade against the table at 90 and 45 degrees, to adjust the set screws. The solution was in my head, a legacy of the thousands of hours I’d spent watching him in his own workshop. But I needed to send the message into the digital ether to find it.
That message opened a door. The Slack channel became my space to talk to him. It was a one-way conversation, a digital journal directed at a ghost.
Landed the Henderson account today. You would have liked their lead engineer. Reminds me of you.
Mom made your beef rendang. It was good, but she still doesn't use enough galangal.
I’m thinking of proposing to Chloe. I’m scared. I wish I could ask you what you thought when you asked Mom.
Each message was a small act of remembrance. I wasn't pretending he was alive. I was acknowledging that his influence, his voice in my head, was still an active presence in my life. The green dot no longer mocked me with its falseness; it reassured me with its persistence. It meant the system he had built was still running.
We leave so many pieces of ourselves behind now, scattered across the digital landscape. An old MySpace profile, a dormant Twitter account, a Facebook page converted into a memorial. These are static places, digital tombstones where friends and family leave condolences like flowers on a grave. They are archives of a life that has ended.
My father’s Slack channel was different. It was active. It was now. That green dot suggested a present tense that felt both impossible and true. He was gone, but he was also, in some strange, quantum sense, still here. His digital self, a byproduct of his meticulous nature and a forgotten password, had become a dynamic part of my grieving process.
It made me think about the selves we construct at work. My father was more than his job, of course. He was a husband, a father, a terrible singer who loved old P. Ramlee movies. But he was also, fundamentally, an engineer. It was his professional persona—methodical, calm, a problem-solver—that was preserved in that Slack channel. And it was that part of him I found myself needing most. When I felt overwhelmed by a technical problem or a career decision, it was the engineer I wanted to talk to. His digital ghost was the colleague I could turn to for advice that I already knew, but needed to hear in his voice.
The permanence of it is what I grapple with most. One day, the power will go out at my mother’s house. The Wi-Fi router will die. The ancient Lenovo will finally give up the ghost. The green dot will turn grey. I know this. And I know I will have to grieve him all over again, in a smaller, quieter way. The loss of his ghost will be a second death.
But I’ve learned something from this strange, two-year-long conversation. We think of memory as a fragile thing, a fading photograph. We try to grasp it, to hold on to moments as they slip through our fingers. But maybe memory isn’t just a record of the past. Maybe it’s an active force. My father’s lessons, his ethics, his way of looking at a problem—they aren’t just memories. They are active processes running in my own mind. Code he wrote that I still execute every day.
The Slack channel didn’t keep him alive. It just created a terminal where I could see that code running.
Last week, I was in his office. My mother had finally asked for help clearing it out. It was a difficult, dusty afternoon, filled with the ghosts of scent—old paper, WD-40, the faint, lingering smell of his cologne. Tucked in a drawer, I found a small, leather-bound notebook. Inside, in his impossibly neat handwriting, were notes on projects, calculations, and, on the last few pages, bits of advice intended for me and my brother.
One line stood out. A good system works even when you're not there.
I looked over at the humming ThinkPad, the screen dark but for the faint glow of the power button. He was right. He had built a good system. A system for truing a saw blade, for organizing a workshop, for living a life of quiet integrity. A system that was still running.
I pulled out my phone and sent him one more message.
Found your notebook. You were right.
The dot was green. For now, that’s enough.
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