Grumpy Coworker

Author: Grumpy103

  • The Ontological Crisis of the Orphaned Recurring Meeting

    There exists in the corporate universe a peculiar form of digital purgatory: the recurring meeting whose original organizer has long since departed the organization, yet continues to manifest on calendars with the persistence of a poltergeist.

    You know the one. Every Tuesday at 2 PM, “Weekly Sync – Q3 Initiative” still appears. Janet created it in 2019. Janet left in 2021. It’s now 2025. The meeting persists.

    The Ship of Theseus, But Make It Annoying

    Philosophy majors spent centuries debating whether a ship remains the same ship after every plank has been replaced. Corporate drones face a more pressing question: Is it still “Janet’s Weekly Sync” if Janet is now a VP at a competitor and half the original attendees have been reorganized into oblivion?

    The meeting has evolved. New people have been added. The agenda (if one ever existed) has drifted from “Q3 Initiative” to “whatever fire we’re currently putting out.” Someone changed the meeting location from “Conference Room B” to “Zoom – see link.” The organizer field still reads “Janet Thompson (External).”

    It’s the meeting equivalent of a hermit crab inhabiting an abandoned shell.

    The Metaphysical Hierarchy of Meeting Death

    Let us establish a taxonomy of meeting cessation:

    Clinical Death occurs when the organizer deletes the recurrence. Clear. Decisive. The meeting is dead, and everyone receives a notification of its passing. We can grieve and move on.

    Brain Death happens when the organizer leaves the company but the meeting remains. The meeting has lost its consciousness, its original purpose, but the body continues to function. Attendees still show up, confused, like neurons firing in a deceased host.

    Zombie State emerges when attendees begin dropping off one by one, but the meeting continues to exist for the two remaining participants who lack either the authority or the initiative to kill it. They meet. They know it’s pointless. They do not speak of it.

    Schrödinger’s Meeting exists when literally no one attends anymore, but the calendar invites persist. Is it a meeting if nobody comes? Does it exist in any meaningful sense? The calendar insists it does.

    The Problem of Remaining Attendees

    Here’s where it gets thorny. If the organizer departs but six people remain, surely the meeting still “exists” in some form. But what if it’s down to two people? One person?

    At what threshold does a “team meeting” become just “two people on a call who should probably just Slack”?

    And here’s the real question that keeps enterprise architects up at night: Who has the moral authority to delete someone else’s recurring meeting?

    You’re not the organizer. You’re just an attendee. Can you unilaterally declare this meeting dead? That’s not murder—that’s more like… meeting euthanasia. Merciful, perhaps, but do you have the right?

    The Solution No One Wants

    The answer, of course, is that someone needs to be granted organizer privileges so they can officially end it. This requires:

    1. Someone to care enough to do this
    2. IT to process the request
    3. Agreement among the remaining attendees that yes, this meeting has earned its rest

    In practice, what happens is: nothing. The meeting continues until the heat death of the universe or the next corporate restructuring, whichever comes first.

    The Deeper Truth

    Perhaps the recurring meeting never truly dies. Perhaps it exists eternally in some quantum state, simultaneously alive in someone’s accepted calendar invites and dead in the absence of human attendance.

    The meeting is not the organizer. The meeting is not the attendees. The meeting is not even the recurrence pattern.

    The meeting is the shared corporate delusion that synchronous time spent together produces value.

    And as long as that delusion persists, so too shall Janet’s Weekly Sync, 2 PM every Tuesday, until the end of time.

    See you there. Or not. The meeting doesn’t actually care.

  • Quiet Shitting: The Ancient Art of Paid Porcelain Time

    Look, we’ve seen a lot of workplace terms come and go. “Synergy.” “Agile.” “Growth hacking.” And now everyone’s clutching their pearls over “quiet quitting” like it’s some revolutionary Gen Z invention. Please. These kids discovered setting boundaries and suddenly you think they’re leading a communist revolution. You know what their grandparents invented? Quiet shitting.

    That’s right. For every thinkpiece about “acting your wage” and “doing the bare minimum,” there were three generations before the current one who perfected the art of the 45-minute bathroom break. And let me tell you, they didn’t need a TikTok to figure it out.

    Your grandfather worked in a factory for 32 years. You think he spent eight hours a day riveting widgets with a smile on his face? Hell no. He spent at least 90 minutes of every shift in that bathroom, and not because of the cafeteria meatloaf. He called it “decompression time.” Management called it “concerning.” His union called it “protected.”

    The bathroom break is the original quiet quit. It’s the Switzerland of workplace passive aggression: technically neutral, completely defensible, and occupied by people who just want to be left the hell alone.

    The Golden Age of Bathroom Avoidance

    Boomers love to talk about their work ethic, but nobody could stretch a bio-break like a 1970s middle manager with a newspaper and a grudge. These weren’t quick pit stops. These were expeditions. Lewis and Clark spent less time exploring the Louisiana Purchase than Clark Griswold’s peers spent in Stall 3 avoiding quarterly reviews.

    You’d see someone grab the sports section at 10:15 AM and know you wouldn’t see them again until 11:00. And God help you if you needed something from them. “Oh, Dave? Yeah, he’s in a meeting.” A meeting with his bowels and the crossword puzzle. Also, if you notice a section of the newspaper goes missing and then later reappears, just assume it’s touched the bathroom floor and/or been handled after a wipe.

    Gen X took it to new levels. They brought magazines. Then Game Boys. Then the first smartphones. One thing to watch out for… if they bring a change of shoes, they’re probably moving into that stall like its a studio apartment.


    The Economics of Excretion

    Here’s the math everyone knows but nobody talks about: if you take one 15-minute bathroom break every day beyond your actual biological needs, that’s 65 hours a year. At $25 an hour, you’re paying yourself an extra $1,625 annually to sit on a toilet and scroll through your phone.

    Your great-grandfather knew this. He just did it with a racing form instead of Instagram.

    The difference is, he felt vaguely guilty about it. He’d come back looking sheepish, maybe mention something about the chili from lunch. There was at least a performance of remorse. Now? Now people are writing Medium posts about “reclaiming your time” and “setting bathroom boundaries.”

    The Passive-Aggressive Olympics

    You know what the most passive-aggressive move is? The post-meeting bathroom break. Someone says something annoying in the conference room, and suddenly you need to “freshen up” for 20 minutes. It’s the workplace equivalent of leaving someone on read, except you’re getting paid for it.

    And the beauty is, it’s completely bulletproof. What’s your boss going to do? Install a timer? Monitor stall occupancy? Stand outside with a stopwatch? HR would have a field day. “Yes, officer, my manager was tracking my bowel movements” is one hell of a lawsuit waiting to happen. Yeah, I know that several companies with trillion dollar market caps basically do do this. Heh. “Do do.”


    The Modern Era

    Now we’ve got people working from home, and even that hasn’t stopped the tradition. We’ve been on Zoom calls where someone’s camera goes off and you just know they’re not “stepping away briefly.” They’re taking a full constitutional while technically still clocked in. It’s remote quiet shitting, and honestly, I respect the innovation. Just don’t flush off mu… oh no, Bob, your avatar lit up with that flushing sound.

    The real quiet quitters aren’t the ones doing the bare minimum at their desks. They’re the ones who’ve calculated exactly how long they can disappear without triggering a wellness check. They’re the ones who know which bathroom on which floor has the best cell service. They’re the institutional knowledge holders of strategic bowel timing.

    In Conclusion

    So before anyone tells me about how revolutionary it is to only do what you’re paid for, remember: your ancestors were pioneering workplace disengagement one bathroom break at a time, long before you could hashtag it.

    They just had the decency to pretend they had diarrhea.

  • Stack Shanking

    Stack ranking (see Vitality Curve)

    Constantly replacing (or threatening replacement of) the bottom performers on an annual basis seems like incremental optimization. So you get two classes of performers replaced: Ones in a long term slump and ones that are persistent performance problems/bad fits. If you’re looking at machinery, then being unable to distinguish between the temporarily malfunctioning and the permanently broken is of no major consequence. But with humans, if they are temporarily malfunctioning due to life circumstances, personal issues, or recovering from burnout, you’ve just discarded someone who likely has institutional knowledge, established relationships, and could return to being a high performer.

    The real problem is that stack ranking treats your workforce like a statistical distribution that must maintain its shape regardless of actual performance. Got a team of eight excellent engineers? Sorry, two of them are now “bottom performers” by definition. Hired nothing but rockstars this year? Congratulations, some of your rockstars are now officially mediocre.

    This creates perverse incentives. Smart employees learn to avoid teams with other high performers. Why join the infrastructure team full of senior engineers when you could join the feature team with a couple of passengers? You’ll rank higher, and ranking is what matters at review time.

    The statistical absurdity compounds when you realize that the bottom 10% getting cut this year might have been middle-of-the-pack last year, and could be top performers next year—but they’ll never get the chance because we needed to satisfy our quota of ritualistic firings. We’re not optimizing for performance; we’re optimizing for the appearance of optimization, which is a very different thing.

    Meanwhile, the stack ranking process itself consumes enormous amounts of management time that could be spent on actual work. Managers spend weeks arguing over whether Sarah deserves a 3 or a 4, while the real problems—unclear requirements, technical debt, process inefficiencies—remain unaddressed.

    And let’s talk about what happens to team dynamics. The moment you tell people they’re competing against their teammates for survival, collaboration dies. Why would I help you solve that gnarly bug when it might make you rank higher than me? Why would I share that clever solution when keeping it to myself might be the difference between keeping my job and losing it?

    Stack ranking is management by spreadsheet, the corporate equivalent of deciding which child to abandon based on their last report card.

  • People in Hell Want Ice Water

    It is a known fact that employees don’t know what they want. They say they want ice machines to work, but they really want all the vending machines to be replaced with a brand new vending service that provides freshly prepared (sort of) items that you can purchase for grocery deli prices without leaving the building—because employees hate leaving the building and stuff.

    So whenever an employee provides feedback, either anonymously or openly, they don’t know what they’re talking about.

    Employees really want open office plans, fancy break rooms, and whimsical methods of celebrating what the hell they supposed to do anyway.

  • Requirements Confusion, the Last Refuge of a Developer Slacker

    Imagine that you, as a developer, are at some stage of the project cycle in a large corporation in which you find yourself not “on time” with your planned “project deliverables.”

    You find yourself in a project meeting, and everyone is giving their updates. Then, just like a freak snowstorm for a kid who didn’t study for a big test at school, key project stakeholders get into a heated discussion about a key project requirement.

    All of a sudden, you are now able to justify, if only to yourself, that your inability to get to project milestones downstream from this contentious requirement was actually a saving grace of the project. You didn’t burn yourself out on a piece of the puzzle that was going to ultimately be made useless. YOU CAN GO OUT AND PLAY IN THE SNOW BECAUSE SCHOOL IS CANCELED!

    But wait…  You still have that test you didn’t study for, or back in the real world, new project requirements that are to be made downstream from the updated requirements being discussed, and the ultimate release date still won’t budge.

    Congratulations. You’ll now have to work 80 hours/week to make up for the major requirements shift. At least you didn’t waste any effort on the original requirements, right?

     

  • The Collateral Damage of a Meeting

    Atlanta, Ga., January 25, 2007 -- Region IV Di...
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    Meetings, much like 1-hour credit lab courses in colleges, carry a much higher price than their appointed time indicates.

    We’ve been over this before:  A 15-minute meeting is more disruptive than a 3 hour one elaborated on the 15-minute meeting agenda:

    The 15-Minute Meeting Agenda

    • 5 minutes travel time/dial-in time/waiting for people to realize their clock is out-of-sync
    • 5 minutes of greetings
    • 2 minutes of status
    • 3 minutes of disconnect beeps or leaving early for a restroom break

    Collateral Damage

    There’s more to it than that this.  There is also collateral damage.  Everyone assumes that calendar openings = free time, so you often end up with every hour filled with at least a half hour meeting.

    Appointment Backlog

    Half-hour meetings rarely run under on time.  In fact, the greeting, handshaking, and orientation portion of the meeting may take 10 to 15 minutes, unless you have an incredible facilitator for the meeting.  Therefore, if the subject matter was worth 30 minutes, the meeting will be closer to 45 minutes in length.  This expansion of appointment time is similar to the reason why your doctor’s appointment runs an hour behind.

    Anticipation Frustration

    With good fortune, your hourly half-hour meetings will only take 40-45 minutes, leaving you with free time in between.  In this space of time you will worry about being prepared for the next meeting, take care of things (like eating) that you’ve not been giving other time for, and sit in the frustration of not being able to start anything in the amount of time you have left.

    Action Items

    Effective meeting facilitation will draw out a to-do list of action items that are to be resolved outside of the scope of the meeting, often to prevent the delay in their resolution from holding up the meeting itself. In principle, these are effective tools. In practice, combined with fully booked schedules, they can be like spending 8am-5pm working on adding items to your personal to-do list–it just keeps getting bigger.

    Compound Multitasking

    With the backlog of to-do list items and meetings, people begin doing “other work” in their meetings. Therefore, as meetings themselves impact the productivity of other work, meetings become less productive and end up running longer to get the same amount of work done–a downward spiral of productivity destruction.

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  • It’s Just Like Elementary School

    Remember the days when you were in school, and some kid in your class would do something while the teacher wasn’t looking? Then, the teacher would demand that the person come forward or the whole class would be punished?

    Ok, maybe that still occasionally happened in high school, or in training for a military service branch. You’re using peer pressure to the enforce the rules. In the high school case, it’s because the mutual pressure of a student’s peers is stronger than any reasonably proportional punishment you can deal out, especially if you have no clue who did it. In the military case, it’s to drive home the concept that every little thing you do impacts the entire team.

    Of course, at work, everything you do has the potential to impact your team. However, I doubt that one team member’s choice to wear jeans with partially exposed backsides should be met with taking away the privilege of wearing jeans for the entire office. It should be met with some sort of HR or law enforcement action, depending on how bad the offense really is.

    But suppose some people are just pushing the rules too far: If people are wearing pajamas to work, then those people should be told by their managers to stop. If entire teams are doing it, obviously the managers are not getting the message through. Even if there is a failure on enforcing some policy on the part of one manager, there shouldn’t be a company-wide change in response. The solution still lies with one person.

    …or you could just treat us all like we’re back in elementary school. Class, we’re all going to have to stay after school because Johnny didn’t get his work done.  Oh, wait. That still happens.

    Never mind, forget this whole post.

  • Diseconomy of Scale

    From Wikipedia: Diseconomy of Scale (The article has the “original research” warning, and therefore, should be taken with more of a grain of salt than even the average Wikipedia article.

    Diseconomies of scale are the forces that cause larger firms and governments to produce goods and services at increased per-unit costs. They are less well known than what economists have long understood as “economies of scale”, the forces which enable larger firms to produce goods and services at reduced per-unit costs. The concept may be applied to non-market entities as well. Some political philosophies, such as libertarianism, recognize the concept as applying to government.

    There are obvious efficiencies that come with increased size: The per-worker overhead of a leased office for two people can be slightly more than half that of an office for one person. Meanwhile, two people can potentially accomplish at least double what person can do.

    Moreover, there is a certain minimum size below which certain tasks are not feasible. One million individuals working alone would likely not be able to create a practical system of roadways going from Atlantic to Pacific coasts. Some things require big scale to make them happen.

    Unfortunately, there is a point where the additional costs incurred by adding additional resources [see Handshake Problem] are greater than the additional savings gained by sharing the resources with one more person.

    The scale problem illustrated with keeping track of organizational “to-do” lists:

    • 1 person – might be forced to write things down on a scrap of paper to keep things organized.
    • 2 people – leave post-it notes.
    • 5-10 people – use team to-do list software.
    • 10-30 people – may use more sophisticated, “issue-tracking” software.
    • 30-100 people – may use a more generic activity management software
    • 100+ people – have to be certified to be on the use of standardized language and procedures so that activities may be managed in the most effective way possible.

    The last step in the chain here are procedures for dealing with procedures to track tasks.  That’s a virtual calculus of bureaucracy. Considering how few people are any good at the mathematical calculus, which deals which actual numbers and formulas, I would imagine that bureaucratic calculus is nearly impossible.

  • Defeating the Clockwatching Game

    Your rivals and managers in the office are playing a clockwatching game with you. Among their tools are:

    • Email timestamps.
    • Parking lot spots.
    • People witnessing you walking in and walking out with your bags.
    • Instant messages peppered through lunch hours.
    • Away status on instant messenger.
    • Online status on instant messenger.

    These things cannot be used in your favor so much as having interference run against them.

    • Schedule Outlook Messages
    • Park in the farthest space available, always.
    • Keep a coffee mug in your car, and fill it up on a different floor. Walk in with you laptop powered up or a keep a spare notebook in your car and walk in with that.
    • Hook up your smartphone to an instant messaging client that works with your instant messenger.

    By the way, if you’re using this to slack off, your lack of productivity will ultimately be found out, you scoundrel.

  • The Producers: Corporate Edition

    For those who haven’t seen The Producers (affiliate link), the premise is two producers who get the idea to oversell shares of a horrible play [hundreds of times over], so that they can make off with the surplus when the play ultimately flops early. Unfortunately, the play is smashing success and the producers are now on the hook for paying out many times the actual profits of the show.

    It seems like support resource planning often goes this way–departments budget and sell their services under the assumption of a best case scenario [virtually nothing goes wrong]. Ultimately, the first outage of services begets additional outages of services, and selling that same support resource to 250 people becomes a recipe for disaster.