Awkward Business Networking Cups Become Irresistible Meme

Unless you are a very particular kind of person, the corporate world can come across as a hellish invention. All the dumb, boring jobs that aren't even really useful are a great way to spur on an existential crisis, and the depressing cubicle offices that employees are being forced back into definitely don't help. Worst of all, many CEOs cream off the best of the profits while the little guys sweat asking for a necessary raise. As if that wasn't enough, a significant percentage of the American workforce are expected to make this kind of thing their livelihood, and summon up the enthusiasm to keep doing it until they reach an ever-advancing retirement age.

It goes without saying that the whole thing can be pretty bleak, but these lines of work do have some benefits now and then. If you work for a benevolent company, maybe they'll throw some good healthcare your way, or a couple of extra personal days. Things get more interesting when you climb the ladder, too. Get lucky and you become one of those guys who gets to stay in slightly upmarket chain hotels to talk about things like business models and whatever the heck "synergy" is.

The work conference is a strange and awkward beast, propelled by a mixture of half-baked ideas and mid to low tier coffee. It was only a matter of time before event planners found the most excruciating way to combine the two, as revealed in a photo tweeted by @jordanmapes. Showing a pile of coffee cups on a table labeled with concepts from sales to artificial intelligence, a sign invites people to "pick a cup based on what you would like to discuss most".

With the set up seeming to suggest a kind of corporate traffic light party where there was no get out of jail free card for not having to have any of these conversations, it's no surprise that this corner of Twitter was not that impressed with the concept. What these creative conference organizers probably didn't account for was that this made their torturous networking idea into the perfect, easily exploitable meme. As it turns out, there are far more important things that most people would rather be discussing, and most of them don't have to do with work. Who knew?

Posted by Ally Perry