It begins, as all tragedies do, with a calendar invitation. No agenda. Twelve attendees. A title like "Sync" or "Touch Base" or the truly chilling "Quick Chat," which has never once been quick. You accept, because declining feels like a career event, and you begin the long walk to the conference room.
The meeting starts seven minutes late because the first agenda item is always defeating the video conference software. Someone shares the wrong screen. Someone is on mute, delivering what appears to be a passionate speech to nobody. Someone else joins from a car, a tunnel, or possibly the bottom of the sea.
Then a slideshow appears, and a person reads the slideshow to the room. Out loud. Word for word. The room, full of adults who can read, listens to the words they are also looking at, in a ceremony that doubles the time and halves the information. A bullet point is not improved by being pronounced.
Somewhere around minute thirty, a brave soul asks what decision this meeting is supposed to produce. Silence. The organizer says the goal is "alignment." Alignment is what we call it when twelve people spend an hour discovering they all agree the situation is unclear. Action items are assigned to "the team," a mysterious entity that has never completed a task in its life.
The true masters of the form end with the most haunting sentence in office life: "Let's schedule a follow-up." The follow-up will have the same people, the same slideshow, and the same outcome, plus a new character: someone who was not at the first meeting and needs everything explained again.
All of it — every update, every status, every attachment — could have been an email. A short one. Three paragraphs, two bullet points, done by 9:04 AM, with your whole morning returned to you like a refund.
Instead, you got a meeting, a follow-up, and a recurring series. That sucks.