As of this week, your relentless “How was your weekend?” coworker was very much appearing to spiral ahead of your first remote meeting of the week this Monday.
Vanessa Hodges, who is known to wait by the office coffee pot on Monday mornings for a brief check-in with all her colleagues, seems to be coming unhinged without her usual small talk and banter.
“Vanessa Slacked me on Monday morning just like, ‘Yoooo wassup? Lol,’” says your coworker Danny Curtis. “I didn’t know what to make of it. There’s no precedent for that kind of thing in our relationship. She mostly just asks me about how my rec volleyball league did over the weekend.”
Vanessa has sent a series of unintelligible messages to coworkers trying to check the status on nothing in particular.
“She keeps sending me all these slack messages that ask how it’s going,” you told us. “When I update her on work she seems unsatisfied. At one point, out of the blue, she asked if she’d ever told me about her childhood cat. I’m starting to wonder if she doesn’t have any friends.”
Vanessa ended the Zoom call by asking everyone if they wanted to meet back the same time tomorrow.
“We’d concluded the discussion. No one could figure out what she wanted,” says Danny.
At press time, Vanessa emailed 30 coworkers to brainstorm ways they could surprise Danny with a flood of emails for his birthday this week.
