When you get "5 minutes back" at the end of a meeting.

Corporations hate me for this one weird trick.

---

There is a very particular and mostly very pleasant energy in a pre-vacation workweek. I wouldn’t ordinarily use this word to describe my workweeks, or with anything having to do with basically anything I’m involved with, but the days that I tie up loose ends or package up work I don’t want to do and fob it off to my underlings generally almost feels relaxing. I am in a different mindset, and looking ahead to spending two weeks in the Chilean deserts and Patagonia and sipping wine in the Santiago/Valparaiso areas, and I’m already halfway out of the workplace part of my brain. My short week and the various work and travel obligations packed into it means I am going through the motions of hitting unnecessarily tight deadlines purely in energy-saver mode.

My incipient vacation brain means that I am in an expansive and increasingly jolly mood, considering I have spent almost every week since mid-October working 50-60+ hours or on the weekends. Much of my newsletters hit my weekly quota of vinegary anti-capitalist whims, especially in my fairly wide-ranging rants about the increasingly apparent fraudulence of some load-bearing verities having to do with free-market competition.

But as I have already mentally departed to South America, I want to touch on the washed-out anhedonia of contemporary Zoom meetings, since, at least in a spiritual sense, my vacation is starting early. Especially when some of these—let’s say “opportunities to collaborate and align ourselves on creative and innovative solutions”—end slightly and unexpectedly early.

The meeting organizer will say something like…

“Alright, no questions? Guess everyone can have five minutes back. Don’t spend them all in one place.”

As everyone chuckles as an autopilot response, my mind spirals into a weird existential quandary: Who made Kelsey from accounts the gatekeeper of time? What am I supposed to with “a few minutes back” other than refill my water bottle and take a quick bathroom break?

The past few months of dealing with a constant onslaught of unreasonable deadlines and emails that begin with Hi! I’m just checking in… or Hey! I know you’re busy, but… have turned me into a bit of a curmudgeon grousing about private sector inefficiencies and endless corporate bureaucracy and the overall absurdity of most white-collar work. But I should turn my pessimism into more of a can-do attitude and make the most of these precious minutes.

With all this unexpected free time, I can embark on a spontaneous trip to Tuscany, so I pack my luggage and book a last-minute ticket on Expedia and then I go to the airport where I am happy to encounter a Potbelly sandwich shop because I have a longstanding vendetta against a local Subway franchise and Subway in general—although one of my proposed ad campaign ideas for them is to give free five-dollar footlongs for life to anyone who legally changes their name to Jared Fogle—and then I fly out to wine country and make my way through some bottles of Vin Santo and Vino Nobile at Avignonesi and then why not just turn this impromptu trip into more extravagant adventures, so I make my way up to Florence because I love sandwiches but going to All’Antico Vinaio is a basic bitch move and I’ve already been to the one in Manhattan anyway so I’ll go to I’ Girone De’ Ghiotti instead because I saw it on an Instagram food account and their Truffle Mortadella and Pecorino on Focaccia looks heavenly and now that I had my fill of Florence, I will make my way to Sicily and check out Mount Etna because I want to see what an active volcano looks like because it is an apt metaphor for how I feel about working in an office environment, so anyways, my five minutes are almost up so I should get back to my desk, but not before I succumb to my American tendencies and grab a Big Mac because I’m curious to see if a European McDonald’s is really that much better and it turns out that it’s not really better and I should’ve capitalized on eating another authentic Italian meal when I had the chance, but I just got an email from client and the next round of revisions is, of course, urgent and high priority so I need to attend to this deliverable.

Or, I have five more minutes to look at postings for other jobs. So much jobbing.

---

LIFE UPDATE: As I alluded to in this newsletter, starting on Wednesday through April 8, I will be traveling to Bolivia and Chile. Posts will occur on our regular schedule in the meantime because I am a giver and want to overflow your cups with content slop. If I don’t respond in the comments or am not active on Notes, it’s because I’ll be off the grid for a little. When I make my glorious return to Toronto, I will come with pictures. I love you all.

---