Office Confessions

Monday meetings are usually predictable: dashboards, forecasts, and too much coffee. But this week, one of our remote teammates gave us a front-row seat to a work-from-home disaster so unexpected, so unforgettable, that our entire team is still laughing about it. Let’s just say… pudding was involved, and professionalism was not.

I need to confess something. I’m a meeting faker. Not in the “I skip them” kind of way. No. I actually create fake meetings for myself on...

Our office printer jams so often we gave it a name: Janet. Every breakdown sparks a chorus of “Dammit, Janet!” and turns into the only real team-building exercise we’ve had all year. Forget trust falls — nothing unites coworkers like screaming at a machine that refuses to do its one job.

Then comes the feedback: “You should work on being more proactive.” Excuse me? I just proactively did your job last Tuesday when you forgot the client presentation on your desk.

Collaboration apparently means listening to three different conference calls happening within arm’s reach while pretending you don’t secretly want to strangle your coworkers with the communal charging cable.

Newsflash: I don’t trust Kevin from Sales to catch me. I don’t trust Kevin to catch a cold.

Karen, I love that you’re passionate about Excel. Truly. But when I asked for a simple expense report, you sent me a file that could...

Let’s set the scene. My Outlook crashed again, my Teams notifications are multiplying like rabbits, and the printer on the third floor has entered a witness protection program. Naturally, I did what any reasonable employee would do: I called IT.

Thirty people, zero email, and a growing pile of theories. While IT rebooted, replugged, and invoked DNS, a neglected delegated mailbox quietly stacked fifteen “payment delinquent” notices from Microsoft. One card update later, the lights came back on.

Leadership’s all-hands started in 2 minutes. Our fancy 360° “owl” conference mic refused to talk to Teams. Centralized IT cheerfully suggested “turn it off and on” from 1,200 miles away. We survived—with a backup plan and a healthy fear of USB-C hubs.

It helps, but the default search still wanders off like a toddler in a theme park.

We lost the KPI tracker. Again. Is it in SharePoint (Team Site > Documents > Metrics), or in Teams (which channel—general, ops-war-room,...

All the conference rooms were booked by single people taking video calls, so the rest of us “peasants” hunted for open “hotel” desks like musical chairs.

I waste an hour a day reconciling the same task across three dashboards so a slide looks pretty.

If a meeting has no agenda and starts with ‘quick update,’ it will consume the day like a black hole. We went in for 15 minutes, came out...

We were told to come in three days a week ‘for collaboration.’ The office Wi‑Fi coughs when someone opens Figma, and all the meeting...

“If it can be snarky, it waits 10 minutes.”

If your calendar looks like Tetris on hard mode, it’s not a schedule—it’s a cry for help.