Employee gets caught after building an app to track how many times his coworkers say "circling back" in meetings

• 
  via Unsplash+ (Pablo Merchán Montes)

  A group of coworkers laughing at what one employee pulls up on their computer.

  _{Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.}

• "[Today I messed up] by building an app to track how many times my coworkers say ‘circling back’ in meetings. Now the whole office uses it.

  So there is a guy at work. Let's call him K.

  K says ‘circling back’ constantly in every meeting. sometimes twice in the same sentence. ‘So just circling back on that, before we circle back to the main point.’ I started noticing it maybe 4 months ago, and now I cannot unhear it. It has ruined meetings for me entirely

  So, as a joke, purely for my own amusement, I vibe-coded a mini wabi app in 10 mins. Every time K says ‘circling back,’ I tap the screen. It tracks daily counts, shows me a weekly graph, [and] gives me a personal best notification

  I showed two colleagues

  Mistake…

• 
  via Unsplash+ (Pablo Merchán Montes)

  "K" speaks to his team during a meeting while using that classic work jargon yet again.

  _{Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.}

• Whether it's “circling back” or “KPIs," work jargon can start to feel empty and meaningless really fast. It's as if we're all playing dress-up, and the language we use in the office becomes one of our greatest performative ways to indicate that we're all so-called “professionals.”

  Any sane person with their head on their shoulders knows that this jargon is, more often than not, a waste of words. Clearly, this employee's coworker was still subscribing to the false notion that using this language made him seem “legit” or good at his job. In the end, it actually made him the laughing stock of the team.

• They immediately wanted to use it too, I shared the link. Not a big deal, right?

  Within two days, there were 9 of us silently tapping our phones every time K spoke. We have a group chat now. Someone made a weekly leaderboard for [the] highest count. Someone else added a feature request for ‘to be honest’ because apparently Kate from finance says it 11 times a meeting and felt left out

  Recently, K said 'circling back' 23 times in a 56-minute sync

  We nearly lost it, someone had to fake a coughing fit

• 
  via Unsplash+ (Pablo Merchán Montes)

  The team has another meeting where "circling back" was a frequently used turn of phrase.

  _{Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.}

• The problem is I now look forward to meetings like genuinely. I check the group chat during calls. We celebrate new personal bests. K said ‘circling back’ at 9:07 am yesterday, and I got three notifications within seconds

  I built an app to cope with an annoying habit and accidentally made meetings the best part of my workday

  K will never know. I feel both terrible and completely at peace with this

   

• TL;DR: Built an app to count how many times my coworker says “circling back” in meetings, and now [the] whole office uses it, and it became a hot topic."

  - Echo-Forge

• 
  via Unsplash+ (Pablo Merchán Montes)

  An employee shows his coworkers the "circling back" tracker he built.

  _{Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.}

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  via Echo-Forge
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