DENVER, CO — Middle Manager Colin Mears slowly realized today that the last 8 months of his career could have just been a single email.
Eight months ago, Colin felt like he finally leveled up in his life when he took the promotion to middle management at a marketing consultant firm, but ever since taking the new job, he has been tasked with nothing but a bunch of busy work and back-to-back meetings in which nothing is ever decided and nothing ever changes.
"Yeah, I have three meetings today," mused Colin as he checked his calendar after logging in to the company network. "All my work over the past 8 months could have just been knocked out in one email, maybe two."
Colin's schedule for Monday included an all-hands mandatory company call at 9 AM for the daily pep talk reinforcing the company's vision statement and core values in which nothing productive happens. Then Colin would be hit with another meeting at 10 AM for his department to discuss the latest campaign again before making any decision to execute on it. Then that meeting would be followed by a leadership call at 1 PM in which the CEO will ask how the department is doing on those specs to then refer the matter over to a committee that will maybe make decisions. Finally, Colin would write up three separate reports at the end of the day, documenting how all the meetings went that day.
"It's been like Groundhog's Day for the past 8 months," thought Colin. "How does our company make money again? What do we even produce?"
At publishing time, Colin was checking his calendar for all the meetings that awaited him for tomorrow.
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