The Calendar Detectives
Several years ago, working for some other company, I was walking in the office on my way to the kitchen to make myself a sandwich when I captured with my peripheral sight some light coming from a colleague’s screen. What caught my attention was the unusual colorfulness of his screen; as I was walking by, I needed to focus a bit further, just like when I see a police car with its lights on and I still have to look at the damn thing although I have seen police cars many times before (always from the outside).
All this happened as I kept slowly strolling to the kitchen; not that I stood there to gaze over his shoulder or anything; everything took place in a matter of a few seconds or so.
It turned out that all the colors were coming from his calendar application being open, which was showing the calendars of many other colleagues (whose names of course I could not see) all superimposed together, like calendars allow you to do. I found it a bit strange, like, who does that? There were more than ten different calendars open; it seemed like a complex sight to see and digest, with all those meetings and things packed together. I did not give much importance to it and just continued marching my way to the ham & cheese I was longing for.
The day went by uneventfully, but at some point later that same day, this colleague came to me to complain that a certain meeting had taken place and he had not been invited. A meeting that he felt he was supposed to attend; said meeting was titled after the project it was related to, and he was indeed working for that project, so he wanted to express his bitterness that he’d been left out. Ok, so I used the diplomat that lives in me and I apologized and said that honestly I didn’t think it required him so I didn’t want to bother him, but sure, next time we would add him. And we moved on.
On another day, another casual glimpse of a colorful calendar caught my eye. But this time, it was a different colleague. She had the same sort of multi-calendar layout on screen, and she seemed very attentively scanning through it. Interesting, I thought. Few days later, said colleague also comes to me and tells me that how come she was not invited to meeting X, because she works for X so she thought she belonged there. Alright, I apologized again, sorry, my bad, and I quickly edited the invitation to make sure she would be there next time.
Days after, a third colleague dropped by my desk asking me for a moment to talk, to which I replied that I was rushing to a meeting and I could not talk at that precise moment, so I proposed we could find some other time. Now, his answer was something:
— Come on, you are meeting with X about Y, that’s not important, let’s go and talk.
Like, he was indeed implying that my already scheduled meeting (which he seemed to know well, including topic, attendees and what have you) was less important than meeting with him, and that I was supposed to just dump the scheduled meeting in favor of meeting him.
Ok, what the heck?
I had casually discovered the work of The Calendar Detectives.
All of a sudden, I connected a few dots. An intense undercover activity of surfing across calendars, performing half-assed cross correlations and cheap data mining was clearly happening, where people were unleashing their inner Sherlock Holmes with the sole objective of having a chance of getting offended for not being part of meeting X or Y. After further investigation, I would eventually get to know that many more were doing calendar mining and that, of course, I wasn't the only target, but because my days were basically spent in meetings, it made me an easy target. I started to feel funnily paranoid every time I needed to create a new meeting.
Who's watching
Tell me who's watching
Who's watching me
We had seemed to reach the point where the only way to make everyone happy was to invite absolutely everybody to absolutely every meeting. A very sociable approach? For sure, every meeting looked like a papal audience. Effective? Not so much.
I tried hard to appraise the calendar detectives’ mindset, and struggled to understand their thinking process. I mean, what kind of person gets bitter if not called for a meeting? I have a blast every time I am not included in a meeting. I do not interpret it as being blindsided, but as a sign that things are progressing regardless of my glamorous presence and things are being discussed and hopefully figured out. What a great feeling.
After knowing all this, I saw a great opportunity to troll The Calendar Detectives, so I started creating bogus meetings with bizarre titles and made-up agendas; it eventually became a lunch break hobby of mine where I’d just enjoy fabricating nonsense using a combination of buzzwords and sensationalist terms. It was silly fun for me, it was a way of bonding with my occasional stalkers and a way to get my calendar blocked from other potential pointless meetings. Everybody wins.
Calendar visibility is a tricky topic. I, personally, think that full calendar visibility is a good thing. When you need to book a meeting with a colleague, of course you check if the person is available and you see his or her calendar, and sometimes knowing that this person is meeting about X or Y with A or B may help to avoid duplication of work. Sure, there are sensitive meetings that you do not want everybody to see: imagine a meeting in the CFO’s calendar called “Bankruptcy brainstorming”. People would freak out. But calendars give the possibility of marking particular things as private, so no problem there. The expected side effect of the calendar detectives is people going fully opaque and blocking their calendars not only from the voyeurs but also from all the rest.
In cinema, the second half of the 80s were a great time for detective movies. Eddie Murphy’s Beverly Hills Cop ranks very high, for me, capturing the aesthetics of an era with the necessary dose of chases across narrow alleys and with cars always losing hubcaps in a high speed turn. And of course great original soundtracks.
I like to imagine The Calendar Detectives stalking my calendar to the sound of this: