Are you trapped in an escape room or just your weekly staff meeting?

ANY BASE, Anywhere - COVID is over, people are in the office, welcome back to Hell. And now your boss has scheduled everyone for an escape room, doubling down on agony through team building.

There are a lot of similarities between staff meetings and escape rooms. Both involve packing people into a confined space because the boss said so. They also showcase the skills of thinkers, doers, overachieving butt-snorkelers, and natural work shirkers alike. Mentally checking out to your happy place is the only way you’ll survive either forced gathering. But how can you tell where you are once you check back in? Duffel Blog understands, and our experts offer these clues to help you figure out in which circle of Hell you’re currently being tormented.

1. Is the group pursuing a definable goal? Clear goals are the stuff of escape rooms. The purpose of a staff meeting is to staff, and meet, and generate more planning and tasks which require more meetings for staffing. They are perpetual self-licking ice cream cones, available only in the flavors of futility and exasperation.

2. Is there a definitive start and end time? Only in escape rooms does a clock tick down steadily toward an end. In staff meetings time itself stops because there's a lot to cover, Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity takes effect, and the boss won’t shut the fuck up with the dumb ass “teaching moments.” Staff meetings last as long as the leader indulges in eye-watering slides, rabbit hole conversations, and the fearful whining of micromanagement.

3. Is someone offering hints on how to get out? In an escape room, you’ll hear clues to advance the group coming in from outside controllers. That won’t happen in a staff meeting because most of your co-workers are far, far away getting coffee and sticky buns, happy as shit that it’s your job and not theirs to be in the meeting. They want you stuck in that meeting for as long as possible and they’ll stay away for hours to avoid being tasked once you escape.

4. Are natural leaders taking charge with innovative solutions? Fat fucking chance of seeing natural leaders or innovation in a staff meeting. Here naysayers dwell, and the souls of innovators die slowly and inevitably. The last time an original thought came out of a staff meeting was in 1864 when Sherman asked Grant if he could go TDY to Savannah and check out the bar scene.

5. Are people speaking the English language? If you hear productive things like, “connect these wires to see if they open a door,” that’s escape room talk. Staff meetings are continual spewing of cryptic acronyms or normal words like “tracking” that are mangled into ambiguous jargon. Staff meeting talk is a mimicking insult to real English, the language of lyrical verse from poets like Shakespeare and Machine Gun Kelley.

The post-COVID world with meetings and forced fun is stressful enough, even for warrant officers who usually couldn’t care less. We hope this guide will help you manage either gathering, and emerge with your pride, sanity and ass intact.

Unless you’re the boss holding the meetings. In that case you’re awesome.

Bull Winkle is a writer, and often mistaken for Machine Gun Kelley.