Once upon a time, meetings were things you went to. They happened in rooms with doors, had chairs—of questionable lumbar support—and came with a vague promise of biscuits. Video calls were sacred rituals—booked with reverence, conducted in purpose-built spaces with technology that failed only half the time. Then came open-plan offices. Then came COVID. Then came The Great Unmuting—where every desk, every laptop, every soul became a node in a corporate panopticon of noise.
Now, I sit at my desk—noise cancelling headphones jammed on like a siege defence—and find myself on at least three calls at once: my own, the one to my right, and the particularly animated huddle three desks over that apparently involves interpretive dance. The meeting invites roll in like a bureaucratic floodplain, and the walls (literal and metaphorical) are nowhere to be found.
The Great Unmuting
The post-COVID workplace promised flexibility through hybrid meetings. A godsend for those with kids hoping to save on daycare or for people who thought that post covid their work would remain 100% remote. What has been delivered is the simultaneous return of physical office attendance and the persistence of virtual meetings. Now, instead of talking to the person next to you, you both join the same video call—on mute, with identical headsets, though slightly different expressions of despair.
