NORTH FENWICK —
A routine “quick question” posed in a North Fenwick logistics office has entered its fourth hour, according to sources close to the desk and a cleaner who has now been past twice.
The question was first raised at 10:14am by procurement officer Keith Bramley, 44, who leaned over a partition and asked colleague Sarah Okafor, 27, if she “had a sec.” Okafor, who had a sec, said “sure.”
That was the last sec she would have for some time. Possibly ever.
“It started with a spreadsheet,” Okafor recalled. “Then it was a different spreadsheet. Then he was explaining how the old system worked before the current system, which was before my time and, I think, before electricity.”
“I came in at 27. I feel 40. I’ve started making a noise when I sit down.”
By 11:30am the conversation had covered a supplier dispute from 2018, Bramley’s views on the new car park policy and a detailed overview of his son’s football team, including surnames and a goal from 2021 described “from three angles.”
By 1pm neither party could remember the original question. Witnesses report that Bramley said “anyway, the reason I ask” on six occasions, none of which led to the reason he asked. Okafor’s lunch, a sandwich, was pronounced inedible at 1:40pm.
Research from the Fenwick Centre for Office Duration suggests “quick question” has a 92% chance of being neither quick nor a question. “Just to pick your brain” averages 47 minutes; “two minutes?” averages nineteen. Over a career, the Centre estimates, the average worker surrenders fourteen months of their one and only life to other people’s quick questions, none of it billable and none of it remembered.
“The words are a disguise,” explained researcher Dr. Paula Gresham. “Nobody would agree to ‘a long, wandering reflection.’ Everybody agrees to a quick question. Management knows this. Management invented it.”
Okafor has since adopted a new strategy. “Headphones,” she said. “No music. Just headphones. They’re a wall now. They’ll bury me in them.”
At press time, Bramley had thanked Okafor, said “that’s really useful,” and returned to his desk, where he immediately sent her an email beginning “Following on from our chat,” with eleven attachments and an invite titled “Quick follow-up (30 mins).”
This article is satire. The people, places, quotes and studies described are fictional.