Team Meeting | 10 AM - 1hr

“Happy Monday everyone,” Suzanne burbled. Emma used a good deal of restraint and avoided rolling her eyes. A small victory. Her poker face was getting better. 

“Now, everyone got the agenda. So first up, we have some housekeeping items. First, congratulations to Melinda, on her six-year work anniversary!”

Emma dutifully hit the applause reaction button. Then the “celebration” reaction button. Then, finally, the “heart” reaction button. She watched as everyone else hit various reaction buttons. 

Poor Melinda. Six years was a long time to cosplay an office worker. Melinda was actually cool, though. She once told Emma a knock knock joke she had come up with. They had just welcomed a new woman to the group: the third Jennifer on their team.

“Knock knock”, she said.

“Who’s there?”

“Jennifer.”

“Jennifer who?”

“Jennifer…um, probably?”

They laughed and agreed that you could probably just decide to call everyone “Jennifer” and be right a reasonable percentage of the time. Did everyone really just decide that they should all name their daughters Jennifer for a few years there, or what? Some kind of mass hysteria caused by fluoride in the water or something? 

She watched a last few heart animations on the screen fade. Someone put a gif in the chat of a duck saying, “Conquackulations!”. She hated herself for chuckling at it. What was happening to her? She privately messaged Melinda, “wow, get me the duck out of here!” Melinda appended a laughing face to her message. She wrote back, “right?? This whole thing is bringing me “down”. Goofy-face emoji with tongue sticking out.

Suzanne went on, “Next, I want to remind everyone that self reviews are due on Friday. Now, I’d really prefer that our team gets them in early, so please aim for Wednesday everyone! Don’t make me come looking for you!” She raised her hand like someone wielding a knife. “Because I’ll do it! Eee, eee, eee!” She laughed. A few people tittered, in a tired kind of way. Jen-2 frowned a little and looked uncomfortable. She usually had a pretty sour look. But Frank threw his head back and laughed and laughed. His screen froze for a moment and he looked absolutely insane. It unfroze and he sat there grinning. Frank. She wasn’t keen on him, but didn’t despise him or anything. He sat there with too many teeth showing, wearing one of the corporate t-shirts. It had the Synbiquity logo (a globe inside a heavy square box) with the one word sentence, “Winning.” underneath. Wow, if she ever assimilated that hard, she hoped someone would put a pillow over her face while she slept.

“Now, once you complete your self review, your manager will complete their review, and then you’ll meet to discuss.”

She messaged Melinda again, “ugh, just kill me now…”

Melinda sent back a gif of Jack Nicholson breaking through the bathroom door, in "The Shining". She wrote, “Exceeding expectations.” Ha. Emma laughed. She and Melinda smirked at each other on camera and stifled laughs.

A self review. Pfft. Why would you ever say anything other than “I am knocking it out of the effing park”? What else could you possibly say? “Emma should work on not rolling her eyes so much in meetings. Emma should also try being, just all-around, a little more chipper! Emma should contribute more gifs in meetings! Maybe you should just effing fire Emma!” She smirked a little, then caught herself. Self review. So absurd.

She’d lost the thread of the meeting, but knew it wouldn’t matter. She heard Suzanne say something about…sweets? No, the “C Suite”. Oh god, what now? “…so John wants everyone to take an extra training on the Core Values this quarter. He feels that not everyone is making those their priority!”

Ah yes, the Core Values…what were they again? They all started with the letter “I”. Integrity, Ideas, and…what was the last one? Idiocy? She stifled a laugh.  

Suzanne was running through them now, “Remember the three “I’s”: Integrity. Innovation. Involvement!

Oh yeah. Involvement. Ha. The three I’s. There are three I’s in the word inimitable. And…indignity. And…invisible. If only she was invisible. If only she could just turn her camera off for a bit. She zoned out and doodled a fuzzy little monster with three eyes on her Synbiquity notepad. She started drawing flames around the monster’s feet, and stuck a little pitchfork in its fuzzy hand. She drew in silhouettes of little cowering people below the monster. Then she drew a word balloon and wrote, “Innovate, damn you!” inside it.

Wow, time was really dragging. She opened her calendar to check whether this was a half hour or an hour meeting. Oh no, a full hour. She wasn’t listening to Suzanne, and thought it would be funny to actually turn her volume off. Could she pretend to listen well enough to get by? Probably. She turned the volume off. She sat there watching Suzanne speak, a few others nod. She nodded a little, as well. Fascinating. Oh yes, I fully agree. Hmmm. Yes, yes. Absolutely! Yes, you’re so right. 

Her screen got a little pixelated for a moment, froze up, and the color shifted darker. Ha! Suzanne looked like some weird demon for a moment. A trick of the messed-up pixels. Oh, too bad, now the picture was clear again. But Suzanne was showing them all something now and was gesticulating with her hands. She turned up the volume in time to hear, “…how we shall summon our master, and how he shall know us.”

What…the…duck? 

Suzanne continued showing them a complicated set of hand gestures. She stopped and her eyes rolled back in her head for a moment. Was she making that weird noise, too? Like a crackly, “n” sound that got louder and softer with her hand movements. She finished a series of complex hand contortions. Then she began again. A few people were half-heartedly trying to copy her. Frank seemed to be getting it and now he was doing it with her. They contorted their hands in a strangely herky-jerky manner. Pulling back two fingers on one hand with the other hand. Now fluttering both hands. Using one hand like a claw over the other bunched-up fist. How could he learn it that fast? What WAS this? Some kind of crazy team-building exercise?

Suddenly Suzanne said sharply, “Emma!”  She jumped a little in her chair. Then Suzanne and Frank said together,  “Why aren’t you participating, Emma?”  They continued the complex hand movements. Now it looked like Elise was managing to do it exactly in sync with Suzanne and Frank, as well.

Emma unmuted her microphone and said, “Oh, I was just trying to watch, until I felt I could jump in…”

Suzanne and Frank and Elise said together, “Just do it. Do it now.”

She held up her hands and flopped them around a little. Wow, Frank and Elise really drank the Kook-aid fast, didn’t they? 

This was a very strange meeting. But, scanning her coworkers on the screen, they all seemed to find it normal. Dull, in it’s usualness, in fact.

Suzanne, Frank, and Elise continued the weird hand movements, encouraging the others to try to follow them. Jake seemed to be getting the hang of it as well, although his square on the screen was so dark, it was hard to tell for sure. Melinda waved her hands ineffectually. Walter and Jen-2 were doing the movements, just a few moments after the others, but actually seemed to be working on learning them.

Emma put on the “raised hand” button.

“Yes, Emma, you have a question,” Suzanne said.

She unmuted her microphone. “Yes, I don’t understand the point of this exercise. Is this supposed to be teambuilding or something?”

“Oh yesssssssss,” said Suzanne. “It’s definitely teambuildinnnnnnnnnng."

Emma frowned. Was Suzanne having some kind of mental break? She went to message Melinda privately, but couldn’t enter anything in the chat window. Ugh. Now what? Emma watched Suzanne’s hands going through their complicated set of gestures. It was kind of mesmerizing.

Emma roused herself. Had she…fallen asleep in the meeting? She couldn’t have. She checked the time; it didn’t seem to have advanced at all! But outside, it seemed to be growing dark. How long had they been in this meeting now?

She looked at her coworkers in their small square cells. Suzanne, Frank, Elise, and Jen-2, continued doing the hand motions. Some of the others were now sitting away from their desks, a few in the far corners of their rooms. Mary was almost entirely off screen, but you could still see a piece of her red sweater and her hand. A red line on the righthand side of her screen, and her twitching fingers coming in and out of view. Walter was standing facing the wall, not moving. It was pretty creepy, actually.

It was time to get the hell out of Dodge, she thought. She clicked on the “leave” button. Nothing happened. She hit the escape key. Nothing. She tried to close the laptop, but it seemed to be stuck open, somehow. Control, alt, delete. Nothing. She stood up from her chair, intent on leaving the room. She crossed to the door and reached out for the doorknob…and found herself on the other side of the room, still walking forward. What? She tried again. This time, when she got to the door, she reached out her hand, but the doorknob was very hot! It burned her hand with an audible sizzle. She pulled her hand back with a yelp. She put her burnt fingers in her mouth for a moment, sobbing a little. She went to the windows of her home office and tried to open one, even though she was on the second floor. It wouldn’t budge. She grabbed her chair, thinking she would smash it through a window. She couldn’t lift it off the ground. It was as if the wheels were heavily magnetized to the floor.

She sat back down in her chair, shoulders slumping. She looked at the screen again. Suzanne, Frank, Elise, and Jen-2 were sitting facing their cameras, smiling and continuing the strange hand movements. She closed her eyes for a moment.

She thought, “Is nobody going to say it?”

She straightened and looked around the room wildly. She put on the raised-hand icon and pretended to sit patiently for a moment. “Yes… Emma?” she said to herself. “You have a comment? Crazy laughter bubbled up inside her, but she caught it in her throat and swallowed hard instead.

“We. Can’t. Leave. Here! We are in some kind of twisted…trap. Is this hell? I mean, it sure seems like hell, all right. A never-ending meeting…?”

Nobody answered her. One person hit the “applause” reaction.

“We need to do something. Call someone! Pull the plug on our computers, maybe? How long will it take the batteries to die? Melinda! Melinda, look at me! Melinda raised her face to the camera. Her face had 4 red lines on each side, where she had repeatedly clawed her fingers down her face. She seemed to stare directly at Emma, mouthing some words over and over.

“Mel…” Emma put her head down on her arms and cried.

Suzanne finally said brightly, “Ok, we’ve heard from Emma.” Frank and Elise mouthed the same words, as she said them, nodding. “Now, if nobody else has any off-topic items, let’s get back to the Agenda.”