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The Trauma of “Accept, Tentative, or Decline”

Dr Stuart Woolley
CodeX
Published in
5 min readAug 20, 2024

High stakes gambling in the fight against meeting anxiety and overload.

“Image generated using OpenAI’s DALL·E.”

I don’t think there’s anything more utterly heartbreaking, more anxiety inducing, and more “one more day and I’m going to open that bakery / coffee shop / goose farm¹” inducing than the sound that the awful abhorrence of supposed collaboration software — Teams — makes when there’s a meeting due in 15 minutes.

Whether you heard it from your desktop, laptop, phone, or even in the distance in an open office it’s always jarring enough to give a sudden jump scare and fill your very insides with a sudden wash of angst ridden fear.

In time, when you’ve been conditioned enough like a slavering Pavlovian dog with a bell, even the sound of the alert in a sparsely populated coffee shop is enough to being back the abject PTSD terror inherent with operating in the Grand Game of Software Engineering.

The cure, however, is pretty simple and remarkably easy to administer — it’s just not to have any meetings in the first place as then, there’d be no alarming and soul wrenching alerts to suffer at all.

Rather like commuting, before the inevitable push that the pandemic gave to it before it quite literally fell off a cliff, accepting out of the blue meeting requests willy nilly has become something of a habit…

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Published in CodeX

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Dr Stuart Woolley
Dr Stuart Woolley

Written by Dr Stuart Woolley

Worries about the future. Way too involved with software. Likes coffee, maths, and . Would prefer to be in academia. SpaceX, X, and Overwatch fan.

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