MIDDLE STOCKBRIDGE —
A Middle Stockbridge operations analyst is said to be “processing” after spending three hours preparing for a meeting that was cancelled two minutes before it began, colleagues confirmed Wednesday. The three hours have not been returned and, according to HR, “were never really yours.”
Fiona Clarke, 29, had prepared a 22-slide presentation, two backup slides for difficult questions, a printed handout nobody asked for, and an opening joke she rehearsed “maybe eleven times” in the office toilets, which are also where she does most of her career planning.
At 1:58pm she received a calendar notification reading “Let’s push this,” with no new date, no explanation and no punctuation.
“I just sat there. I’d already put my lipstick on. I’d already done the face you do before a meeting. I had nowhere to put the face.”
The meeting, titled “Q3 Alignment Sync (Quick),” had been scheduled by senior manager Graham Tolley, who later explained that “something came up.” Colleagues believe it was lunch. Tolley earns four times Clarke’s salary and has never personally made a slide.
According to the Stockbridge Bureau of Workplace Futility, the average office worker spends 31% of their week preparing for meetings, 22% attending them and 9% recovering from the ones that are cancelled. The remaining 38% is spent writing summaries of meetings for people who were in them. Across a 45-year career, the bureau calculates, this adds up to roughly eleven years of a single human life spent on calendar admin. The bureau’s report was due to be presented at a meeting, which was pushed.
Workplace psychologist Dr. Neil Barraclough called it “a uniquely modern form of grief.” “The body prepares for battle,” he said. “Then the battle sends a calendar update. Then it happens again on Thursday. Then you retire.”
Clarke said she would not let the work go to waste. “I’m saving it in a folder called ‘Final,'” she said. “Next to ‘Final_v2’ and ‘Final_ACTUAL.’ When I leave, someone will delete the whole drive in one click. That’s my legacy. A click.”
At press time, the meeting had been rescheduled for next Thursday, by which point every figure in the presentation will be out of date and Tolley will have forgotten what it was for.
This article is satire. The people, places, quotes and studies described are fictional.