Workplace nonsense isn’t a new invention of the modern office – it’s been with us since the dawn of humanity. Ever since the first caveman CEO grunted orders by the fire, people have been finding absurd ways to complicate getting things done. Over millennia, the art of appearing productive without actually being productive has evolved, nurtured by empires, corporations, and an endless parade of dickheads in every era. In this satirical timeline, we’ll journey from prehistoric times to today, uncovering how each age contributed its own special flavor of professional absurdity. Spoiler: not much has changed – the jargon and job titles are new, but the nonsense is timeless.

10,000 BC – The Caveman “Team Huddle”

The very first workplace dickhead emerges in a prehistoric tribe. One caveman, self-appointed as Head of Rock Procurement, insists on holding a morning huddle around the campfire before the hunting party sets out. He babbles about “strategic mammoth acquisition” while everyone else just wants to get on with the hunt. By the time this primitive meeting adjourns, the mammoths have long since wandered off. Congratulations, caveman – you invented the meeting that should have been an email (not that emails exist yet, but give it a few thousand years).

3000 BC – The First Ever “Quick Sync” Meeting

Ancient Egyptians, known for architectural genius, likely also pioneered corporate nonsense. Picture a Pharaoh’s project manager overseeing pyramid construction who gathers the workers for a “quick sync”. An entire afternoon is lost debating whether to use big stones or really big stones for the pyramid base. They form a subcommittee to explore stone metrics, someone suggests “let’s circle back,” and in the end no actual decision is made. The project runs 50 years behind schedule, but the project manager still insists it was a “valuable alignment session.”

400 BC – Greek Philosophers Discover “Thought Leadership”

In ancient Athens, Socrates perfects the art of sounding smart without delivering results. He hosts symposiums that consist of endless questions and zero actionable conclusions – essentially the first brainstorm sessions. Plato takes diligent notes (the first meeting minutes?) while Socrates keeps asking “But what is a good quarterly result, really?”Instead of solving anything, they congratulate themselves on their deep thought. This laid the groundwork for the modern consultant: ask endless questions, provide few answers, send an invoice. Greek philosophers basically branded philosophy as the original thought leadership, impressing everyone and implementing nothing.

100 AD – The Roman Empire Perfects Bureaucracy

The Romans take workplace nonsense to new heights with an imperial bureaucracy so complex that it makes today’s paperwork look cute. Any simple task – say, building a new aqueduct – requires approval from seven different officials, none of whom have ever lifted a single stone. Every request must be submitted on wax tablets in triplicate, then stamped by a guy whose only job is stamping things. The phrase “per my last papyrus” enters the lexicon as harried scribes reference memos that their bosses ignored. Projects bog down in process, but Roman officials celebrate the efficiency of their system in annual reports to Caesar. Sound familiar? It’s basically the ancestor of today’s multi-layer approval process and reply-all email chains.

1200s – Feudal Lords and Medieval Micromanagement

Life in the Middle Ages isn’t all plagues and prayers – there’s workplace nonsense too, just in castles and guilds instead of high-rises. Kings and feudal lords employ court advisers (often their clueless cousins) who delight in giving pointless orders. A lord might demand hourly updates from his knights on their quest progress, essentially a medieval KPI tracking system. Nepotism runs rampant: Sir Dunning, the Duke’s half-witted brother, gets put in charge of the grain stores and promptly causes a famine. Meanwhile, craft guilds hold meetings about the proper length of shoe tips for no real reason. These feudal micromanagers prove that mismanagement isn’t a modern invention – back then you couldn’t get fired for incompetence unless the king literally beheaded you, which really raised the stakes for underperformers.

1400s – The Renaissance PowerPoint (Before PowerPoint)

The Renaissance produces brilliant minds… and new flavors of professional BS. Innovator Leonardo da Vinci prepares an impressive portfolio of sketches for a flying machine – basically a 15th-century pitch deck with gorgeous visuals. Instead of marveling, his patron asks if Leonardo has “benchmarked these designs against industry best practices” (in Latin, presumably). They request a few more drawings (the first change request) and question his ROI on the Vitruvian Man. Frustrated, Da Vinci contemplates throwing himself off a tower – perhaps to test his own parachute. In short, Renaissance visionaries often faced investor and committee nonsense eerily similar to a modern office: lots of “could you iterate on this?” and not a lot of progress.

1770s – The East India Company and the Original “Stakeholder Engagement”

The British East India Company dominates global trade in the 18th century and introduces corporate doublespeak to governance. They claim to be engaging local stakeholders in India – which is a polite way of saying “take over everything and exploit it”. Meetings of the Company’s directors revolve around maximizing shareholder value at all costs, even if it means actual war. They draft the first insanely long mission statement, full of flowery language about civilization and commerce to mask the plunder. Also born here: the practice of overpaid executives blaming the natives(or anyone else) when quarterly numbers disappoint. It’s colonialism meets corporate buzzwords – the earliest case of a company writing a press release that says nothing while doing whatever it wants behind the scenes.

1920s – The Birth of Corporate Jargon

The early 20th-century industrial boom leads to huge companies – and a new species of manager who produces nothing tangible, so they produce jargon instead. By the 1920s, meetings in smoky boardrooms are filled with talk of “synergy,” “optimization,” and “leveraging core competencies.” No one truly understands these words, but everyone nods solemnly as if great wisdom was shared. Bosses start insisting on three-letter acronyms for everything, from KPI to ROI, to sound official. This era establishes that if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with BS – a tradition that carries right into today’s corporate buzzword bingo.

1950s – The Rise of the Open-Plan Office (and First Pointless Meetings)

Post-war executives decide that if you jam employees into one big room with no walls, productivity will skyrocket. Thus the cursed open-plan office is born. In theory it “increases collaboration,” but in practice it means everyone is distracted by Bob from Sales yakking on the phone all day. Managers (safely hidden in their corner offices) start holding meetings to plan other meetings, pioneering the art of the completely pointless conference. A mid-level dickhead proudly introduces the weekly “all-hands” meeting – which accomplishes nothing except making employees daydream about actually doing work. Unsurprisingly, productivity plummets, but the execs declare the new office layout a success because it “fosters team spirit.”

1980s – The Consultant Gold Rush Begins

In the greed-is-good 1980s, corporations decide that internal talent isn’t enough – better to pay outside consultants huge sums to tell them what their own employees have been saying for years. Firms like McKinsey and BCG thrive, selling fancy frameworks and 2×2 matrices to executives in need of validation. The legendary “Four-Box Model” is born, allowing simple problems to be reframed as complex strategic quadrants​

. MBA-toting consultants swagger through offices, conducting weeks of interviews and then regurgitating the obvious in slick slide decks. It’s the era of Management by PowerPoint, and companies eat it up. After all, why trust the folks on the ground when a guy in an expensive suit and an Excel model can confirm it for a million-dollar fee?

1990s – PowerPoint Becomes a Weapon

With the personal computer and projector becoming common, the humble business presentation mutates into a monstrous slide deck. 1990s executives figure out that the more slides in a presentation, the fewer chances anyone will object – because they’ve fallen asleep by slide 52. A meeting about a minor process change now comes with a 60-slide PowerPoint (78 slides if the presenter is feeling spicy) and lots of clipart. Entire meetings turn into endurance tests as charts, animations, and bullet points numb everyone’s brains. If anyone dares ask a question, the presenter will gladly whip out bonus slides hidden in the appendix. By the end, “thank you” is on the final slide, and also what everyone in the room whispers in relief.

2000s – The “Pivot” Era in Tech

The early 2000s dot-com bust teaches startups a magical word to avoid admitting failure: “pivot.” Instead of saying “our initial idea was dumb and flopped,” founders proclaim they’re pivoting to a new strategy. A startup that began as a social network for dogs suddenly pivots into a fintech payment platform for millennials. Amazingly, investors keep pouring in money because hey, they might be on to something now. Internally, this era creates a new kind of workplace dickhead: the visionary who insists every flop would work if we just reinvent it slightly. It’s basically corporate Darwinism in fast-forward – only the buzzwords adapt (today we call it “iterating”). The pivot craze proves that in business, there’s no failure, only pending success if you spin it right.

2010s – The AI & Blockchain Hype Bonanza

As the internet era matures, companies realize they can’t attract attention with normal stuff – they need AI and blockchain, even if they have no idea what those words mean. In the 2010s, every company from shoe retailers to frozen yogurt chains brand themselves as “AI-driven” and slap the word “Blockchain” into their mission statements. A small firm selling garden gnomes online rebrands as GnomeChain.AI and watches investors throw money at them. Meanwhile, actual meetings are filled with baffling jargon about “machine learning synergy” and “decentralized paradigms.” It’s the second coming of the 1920s jargon outbreak, now turbocharged with tech terms. And of course, nobody in the room wants to admit they have no clue how a neural network works – so the charade marches on, and the funding does too.

2020s – Remote Work and Virtual Insanity

The 2020s bring a global pandemic and with it the largest experiment in remote work ever. At first, something miraculous happens: freed from constant supervision and endless in-person meetings, many employees get more work done at home. This terrifies the old-school bosses. In a panic, managers flood the calendar with back-to-back Zoom calls to reassert control. Now your pointless status meeting just has a digital twist – “Could you unmute and say that again?” becomes the refrain of the year. Offices go virtual, but the nonsense persists: we endure virtual team-building exercises (“Friday Fun Quiz, everyone!”) and message fatigue on Slack at all hours. Dress shirts on top, pajamas on bottom – the work-from-home era proves that no matter the medium (office or Zoom), a true workplace dickhead will find a way to make your day absurd.

Present Day – The Corporate Circus Comes to Town: After thousands of years, we’ve arrived at a modern workplace stocked with every archetype history groomed for us. The micromanaging bureaucrat? Descendant of those Roman officials with their papyrus. The jargon-spewing executive who talks a lot but says nothing? Hello, 1920s buzzword pioneer. The meeting-addict manager scheduling five check-ins a day? A direct spiritual successor of that Egyptian pyramid project manager. Today’s office is basically a circus of these characters, complete with clowns (morale officers running trust falls) and lion tamers (IT guys keeping feral printers in check). It’s chaotic, it’s frustrating, and yet somehow we still pretend it’s normal. The costumes and technology have changed, but the nonsense at work is as strong as ever – a legacy millennia in the making.

The Future – No Escape from the Nonsense

What’s next? If you think modern corporate absurdity has peaked, think again. The future promises to evolve workplace dickheadery in bold new ways (because of course it does). Here’s a brief glimpse into our fate:

• AI-Generated Gibberish: Real people may eventually stop writing jargon-filled reports, but don’t worry – algorithms will gladly take over. Future meetings will feature PowerPoints entirely written by AI, loaded with phrases like “holistic hyper-growth synergy.” We’ll have email inboxes clogged with auto-generated messages that sound important but are pure nonsense. (And yes, some manager will proudly tout that as a productivity win.)
• Metaverse Meetings: Just when you finally got used to Zoom, the company will drag you into the Metaverse for meetings. Put on a VR headset at your home office so your avatar can sit at a virtual conference table – it’s just as pointless, but now in 3D! There will be new consultants called “Metaverse Productivity Gurus” charging a fortune to help companies navigate virtual office politics. It’ll be the same old “this could’ve been an email” meeting, only now you’re a legless cartoon figure in cyberspace.
• Even Fancier Titles: The corporate love affair with outrageous job titles will reach new heights. Prepare to work alongside Chief Visionary Storytellers, Global Thought Architects, and Principal Synergy Officers (whatever that means). In the future, nobody will simply be a “manager” of anything – they’ll all be “Executive Sherpas” and “Innovation Ninjas.” It’ll look great on LinkedIn, and accomplish just as little as before.

As history has shown, workplace nonsense will never die. Every time one form of BS gets old, a shiny new version emerges to take its place. So, grab your coffee and enjoy the show – this circus has been running for ages, and it isn’t closing anytime soon. The specific buzzwords may change, the technology may advance, but rest assured: the dickheads will always be with us, finding innovative ways to make work utterly ridiculous.