Estimated reading time at 200 wpm: 15 minutes
Well the last few weeks have been very heavy. I spent a ton of time investigating AI related issues. So this story – a true one anonymised – is a welcomed break. Oh aye it was – and I needed assistance to get up off the floor. I was in stitches. So it comes with health warning. You could end up peeing yourself, or having better than your dose of promethazine! No chemicals. No prescription required! 😹
Whether or not you agree our Fat Disclaimer applies
I opened my inbox on a Tuesday afternoon with the innocent, childlike optimism of a person who still has a slight hope that adults organise things properly. There it was, gleaming at the top of the pile: a calendar invitation. A save the date. A promise of a future event where human beings would gather, either virtually or in the physical realm, to discuss matters of great importance in the East of England.
I read it twice. I read it three times. I checked the timestamp to see if I had somehow slipped into a parallel dimension where time itself had lost all meaning. The email had been sent on the afternoon of September 2026. It instructed me to save the date. It did not, however, tell me what the date was. It was like being handed a treasure map with no X, no landmarks, and a note at the bottom saying, “If enough people are interested, we might draw the rest of the map later.”
This is not an isolated incident. This is what happens when someone discovers the “send to all” button before they discover the “basic logic” button. And so, dear reader, I invite you to join me in marvelling at the sheer, majestic chaos of an email that manages to say absolutely everything and absolutely nothing at the same time. If you do not laugh, you will cry. I chose to laugh. 😂🙈
1. The anatomy of a masterclass in confusion
Let us dissect this email with the reverence it deserves. If you were to teach a university module on how not to organise a meeting, this would be the core text. It is not merely an email. It is a work of surrealism. It is a haiku written by someone who has never seen a haiku but has heard rumours of their existence.
The subject line that promised the world
“Panel Meeting – Virtual and Face to Face – East of England Location.” Read that again. Soak it in. There is a confidence here that borders on delusional. It reads like a travel brochure for a resort that has not yet been built, on an island that may or may not exist, in a country that has not been invented. It offers you the choice of attending either virtually or in person, which is thoughtful, except that neither option currently has a time, a date, or a confirmed address.
The save the date that forgot the date
The body of the email contains a sentence of breathtaking economy: “Please save the date.” Which date? The date of the email? The date of the meeting? The date of the next scheduled heat death of the universe? Nobody knows. The instructions are clear a mud!. You are being asked to reserve a slot in your calendar for an event somewhere in the Milky Way! It is like being told to pack a suitcase for a holiday without being told the destination, the departure time, or whether you will need a passport, a swimming costume, or a suit of armour.
The venue that exists only in theory
We are informed, with what can only be described as optimism, that if sufficient interest is received for in-person attendance, an East of England venue will be arranged. This is not a venue. This is a cloud of hopeful vapour drifting across the Fens, hoping to one day condense into a conference room with a broken projector and a plate of custard creams. The email does not tell us where in the East of England. It could be Norwich. It could be Cambridge. It could be a lay-by off the A14 with a folding chair and a thermos. The geography of the East of England is vast, and we are expected to guess.
The attachment with no name
Attached to this masterpiece is a single file. It is named “Untitled.” It weighs 11.2 KB. Nobody knows what it contains. It could be the agenda. It could be a photograph of a potato. It could be a blank document that has been saved accidentally and attached out of sheer habit. The mystery is almost impressive. In an age where metadata is everywhere, where every file has a name and every name has a purpose, this attachment has simply refused to participate. It is the digital equivalent of a shrug.
The meeting link to nowhere
Finally, we are given a Microsoft Teams link, complete with a meeting ID and a passcode. This is the crowning achievement. It is a door, presented with great ceremony, that opens onto a room with no walls, no floor, and no clock. You can click the link. You can enter the passcode. You can sit in the virtual waiting room until your laptop battery dies and your soul slowly leaves your body. But you will never know when to do so, because no time has been specified. It is a portal to a meeting that cannot occur, hosted by a person who has not yet decided whether it will occur, in a location that has not yet been chosen.
3. What the fawk is a human supposed to do with this?
Right. Enough admiring the wreckage. At some point, a real person has to actually deal with this email, and that person is you. So let us walk through the practical reality of trying to attend a meeting that exists in the ether! Get ready.
Book a train to a place that has not been chosen
The email says “East of England.” The East of England is not a place you can get to for a cup of tea. It is a region. It contains Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, and Bedfordshire. It is thousands of square miles of fields, market towns, and dual carriageways. You cannot buy a ticket to a compass direction. But you can, if you are feeling reckless and adventurous, open a train booking app and stare at it until you weep.
If you are a certain type of optimistic fool, you might start guessing. You might think, “Well, the sender works for a company of a strange name, so let me investigate where that lot are based.” And then you find yourself on a corporate website at eleven o’clock at night, trying to reverse-engineer a venue from a domain name like a detective in a bad television drama. This is geocaching part of your life expectancy.
Pack for every possible outcome
Because you do not know where you are going, you do not know what to wear or what to bring. So you pack for all of it. A suit, in case it is formal. Jeans, in case it is not. A waterproof coat, because it is the East of England and the sky is permanently considering its options. A thermos, in case there is no catering. Snacks, in case the thermos is not enough. A charger, a power bank, and a spare charger for the power bank. By the time you finish, you are not attending a panel meeting. You are embarking on a fishing expedition.
Book a hotel just in case
Since no time has been given, you cannot possibly travel on the day. So you book a cheap hotel the night before, somewhere vaguely central, near a station, with parking, and a breakfast that starts at some ungodly hour. You do this knowing full well that the venue might turn out to be four hours away in the opposite direction, and that you will be eating that breakfast alone while crying quietly into your hash browns. But you book it anyway, because you are a professional, and professionals prepare for anything.
Keep the Teams link as your emergency parachute
You copy the meeting ID and the passcode into your notes app. Not because you intend to use them, but because you think you are not an idiot. If the venue falls through, if you get lost, if the whole thing collapses into farce before it has even begun, you can still dial in from a motorway service station with a lukewarm coffee and a look of quiet resignation. You are covered. You are always covered. This is what separates you from the person who sent the email.
Show up and hope
And then, finally, you go. You travel to a region. You stand in a town. You wait for a follow-up email that may never arrive, containing an address that may not exist, for a meeting that may not happen. You are, in the truest sense, attending a rumour. And somewhere, in an inbox far away, the organiser is no doubt congratulating themselves on a job well done.
4. The state of the human race, and the case for our robot overlords
And now we arrive at the part that is not funny, except that it is, except that it is also deeply, profoundly bleak. Because the question that lingers after the laughter dies down is this: how did we get here?
We built machines that can do better than this
We live in an age of miracles. We have artificial intelligence that can write code, compose music, diagnose rare diseases, pass professional examinations, and hold a conversation with a nuance that would have seemed like science fiction a decade ago. We have algorithms that can predict the weather, map the human genome, and land a rover on another planet with pinpoint accuracy.
And yet, in the same world, on the same planet, on a Tuesday afternoon, a human being with a functioning brain and a paying job composed an email instructing fifty-five people to save a date that was not specified, for a meeting that was not scheduled, at a venue that did not exist, with an attachment named “Untitled” and a video link to a room with no clock. The machines are not coming for our jobs. The machines are watching us, baffled, wondering not too hard why we bothered inventing them if this was the baseline.
The sheer volume of the chaos
Here is the part that elevates this from a mistake to a phenomenon. Once is an accident. Twice is a coincidence. But this individual did the same thing earlier in the day for another meeting, and then followed up with three more invitations in precisely the same manner. That is not an oversight. That is a signature style. That is a person who has looked at the concept of a calendar invitation and decided that the details are somebody else’s problem.
One can only imagine what the rest of their working week looks like. Emails sent to the wrong distribution lists. Spreadsheets with no headers. PowerPoint presentations with the title slide still reading “Click to add title.” And somewhere in the middle of all of it, a person who believes, with genuine conviction, that they are doing a good job. There manager of course has their head deeply embedded in a dark space.
The absurdity of expertise
The email came from someone in a corporate domain, a job title, and presumably a salary. It came with the full weight of institutional authority. It was addressed to dozens of people, which implies that this was a meeting of some consequence. And yet it demonstrated less logistical competence than a 5-year-old organising a birthday party. The gap between the apparent seriousness of the enterprise and the actual quality of its execution is so wide that you could park a lorry in it. Possibly several lorries. Possibly an entire fleet.
Laugh or cry
So we come back to the choice. You can cry. You can weep for the state of professional standards, for the slow erosion of basic competence, for the fact that somewhere out there a person is being paid actual money to send emails like this to actual colleagues who will actually consider attending.
Or you can laugh. You can laugh until your ribs ache and your eyes stream. You can laugh until someone asks you what is so funny and you cannot even explain it without laughing harder. You can laugh because the alternative is despair, and despair is far less entertaining.
The robots are not the problem. The robots would have asked for the date before hitting send. The robots would have named the attachment. The robots would have booked the venue. The robots, in short, would have done the job.
We should probably be nicer to them.
5. A modest proposal for the organiser
Since we have established that the situation is beyond saving, and since we have all had a good laugh at the expense of a stranger who will never read this, it seems only fair to offer something constructive. Not for their benefit, obviously. For ours. For the fifty-five invitees who are still sitting here, staring at an email that refuses to make sense, wondering whether we are supposed to bring a packed lunch or a passport.
Step one: acknowledge the void
The first step, as with all recovery programmes, is admission. Somewhere in that organisation, a person needs to stand up and say the words out loud: “I sent a save the date without a date.” Not in a whisper. Not in a hurried email marked urgent. Out loud, in a room, preferably with a flip chart and a supportive colleague holding a box of tissues. Only then can the healing begin.
Step two: find a calendar
There are, at the time of writing, approximately [xxxxxx] calendar applications available to the modern office worker. Some of them are free. Some of them came pre-installed on the computer. Some of them are so simple that a moderately intelligent golden retriever could operate them with minimal supervision. Any one of these would have solved the problem. The organiser did not need to invent a new system. She did not need to consult a specialist. She needed to open a calendar, look at a day, and type the name of that day into an email. This is the level of difficulty we are dealing with. It is roughly equivalent to making a cup of tea.
Step three: choose a venue before announcing a venue
This is a bold and controversial suggestion, but hear me out. If you wish people to attend a meeting in person, it helps if there is a place for them to attend. Ideally, this place should be a real building, with a real address, in a real town, that appears on a real map. The East of England is a lovely region, but it is not an address. You cannot post a letter to it. You cannot order a taxi to it. You cannot stand in the middle of it and hope that a panel meeting will spontaneously materialise around you like a weather event.
Step four: name the attachment
The file was called “Untitled.” It weighed 11.2 KB. This tells us nothing. It could be the agenda. It could be the minutes of a previous meeting. It could be a picture of the organiser’s cat. We will never know, because the file has no name and the email has no context and the whole thing is one small step away from being an anonymous note pushed through a letterbox. A single word would have solved this. “Agenda.” “Draft.” “Invite.” “Cat.” Anything. The bar was on the floor and it still managed to limbo underneath it.
Step five: consider the robots
Finally, and most importantly, consider the alternative. Consider a world in which the task of organising this meeting had been handed to a machine. Consider how that machine would have behaved. It would have asked for a date. It would have asked for a time. It would have asked for a venue. It would have named the attachment. It would have checked that the Teams link corresponded to a meeting that actually existed. It would have done, in other words, the bare minimum.
And then it would have sent the email, and nobody would have laughed, and nobody would have cried, and nobody would have spent five minutes of their life in stitches, holding onto a desk for support, unable to type properly because the absurdity of it all had temporarily disabled their fine motor skills.
So perhaps we should not be too harsh on the organiser. Without her, we would have had nothing to laugh at. Without her, this blog post would not exist. Without her, the rest of us would have no way of knowing how thoroughly, magnificently, catastrophically lucky we are to be even slightly more competent than the person who is supposedly in charge.
Here ends the lesson. Somebody please help me up off the floor.
