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:
- Someone to care enough to do this
- IT to process the request
- 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.
“The only constant is change.”