The Perfect Gift

I have solid, unglamorous life experience surviving meetings, and let me tell you, nobody prepares you for what happens after. You’ve made it out. You’ve got the thousand-yard stare and the sad, uneaten protein bar in your bag. And then somebody hands you a candle. A candle! As if the smell of ‘Fresh Linen’ has ever once de-escalated a whiteboard hostage situation. What every meeting survivor actually needs is a small, honest acknowledgment that the last ninety minutes of their life were, in fact, a hostage situation, and that someone else lived to tell about it.

What a meeting survivor actually wants (hint: it is not a mug)

People love giving mugs to a burnt-out coworker because a mug is cheap, stackable, and lets them avoid actually asking ‘so how bad was it in there.’ I own eleven mugs. Four of them say things like ‘Rise and Grind’ in a font that suggests the designer has never personally ground anything except their own will to live in a 9 a.m. status update. None of them have ever once said ‘I know Gary interrupted you four times to ask if the slide could be ‘a little more blue.” A mug is a hostage negotiator who shows up, waves through the window, and leaves. Useless.

What I want, as someone who has clawed her way out of more status updates than I can count, is for someone to look me dead in the eye and say, ‘I know exactly which meeting did this to you, and I brought receipts.’ That is a gift. That is love. That is basically a Hallmark card if Hallmark had any spine at all.

Every meeting survivor deserves a candle that admits defeat

Here’s my proposal for the candle industry, free of charge, because I am generous like that: make a candle called ‘Day Two Of This’ that smells like burnt coffee and quiet despair. Put it next to the ‘Fresh Linen’ one. Watch it outsell everything. Because nobody trapped in a nine a.m. recap wants ambiance. They want validation. They want a small flickering flame that says ‘yes, this meeting could have been an email, and yes, everyone in the room knew it, and no, nobody said anything because Gary was presenting.’

Instead we get candles named after emotions nobody actually feels during a meeting, like ‘Serenity’ and ‘Bergamot Dreams.’ Nobody in a meeting has ever experienced bergamot dreams. The only dream anyone has in a meeting is the dream where the fire alarm goes off and it’s real and you get to just leave.

The gift that finally treats a meeting survivor like a war veteran, which, frankly, tracks

I’ve started asking myself what a meeting survivor’s support group would even look like. Folding chairs, bad coffee — so, basically, another meeting, except this one has a point. Someone stands up and says ‘my name is Craig, and it has been eleven days since anyone asked if we could ‘take this offline,” and everyone claps, because we understand that ‘take this offline’ means ‘I will never bring this up again and neither will you, but we both know it is not resolved.’

The greeting card industry has completely fumbled this. There is a card for graduations, weddings, the birth of a child, and even, God help us, ‘sorry your cactus died.’ There is no card that says ‘congratulations on surviving a meeting where someone said ‘let’s circle back’ four separate times and everyone nodded like that meant something.’ That card would sell out immediately. I would personally buy forty and mail them to strangers.

So if you’re standing in an aisle somewhere, gift in hand, panicking because your friend just texted you ‘send help, it’s day two’ from inside a conference room with the blinds drawn, do the humane thing. Skip the candle. Skip the mug. Get them something that says, out loud, in print, that somebody else has been exactly where they are, and made it out, and wrote it down as proof.

Because honestly, at this point, ‘I see you suffering’ is the most romantic sentence in the English language, and if a gift can say that better than a scented candle named after a beach nobody’s ever been to, I am buying it in bulk, wrapping it badly, and leaving it on every conference room chair in the building.