Sorry, I'm in a meeting

At a past firm I managed a team of SREs.

This was very much a "fire drill all the time" kind of place (vs "slow and steady"). The team came to me and said:

"Alex, we keep getting bombarded by meeting requests and have no focus time."

My solution was to create a weekly "team meeting" from 8am to 11am every Friday and invite all of them to it.

They loved it!

I mentioned to them that making a meeting like this was something they could have done themselves but they responded:

"It carries more weight coming from you. Plus, if someone tries to schedule over it, they are more likely to think twice and/or I can say 'Hey, you have to talk to Alex.' "

This has real demand, I ended up in the Gitlab secondary youtube channel one day, ordering by most views, and I found a video [0] of a seemingly normal uninteresting meeting with millions of views. Turns out people were using this as an excuse for looking like they were busy. They disabled comments now but I saved some of them because I thought it was hilarious:

I play this when I need my family to leave me alone - so helpful 4.5K I play this when I pretend to be busy. This meeting is literally about anything you want it to be about lol 1.5K I love that we all arrived at this video for the same reason 2.6K Every now and then I'll pause it at a good point in between them talking to make my own voice heard contributing to the "meeting" lol. Gets the full effect in! And the beautiful thing is their conversation just flows with it like they heard me lol. 562

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBVtvOpU80Q

There's no one talking over another, each audio clip plays only, and immediately after one stops. The voice clarity is also too clear as most synthetic voices are for the obvious reason of being understood. Never sounding organic. Does this fool my toddler? Maybe.

The scripts are hilarious, yet not inaccurate. I can't stop chuckling. 'Are you happy with that?' 'Happy is a strong word' 'OK' moves on to the next topic

Reminds me of the "boss mode" / "boss key" in old games, like MS-DOS days, which would switch the screen to some spreadsheet mockup or suchlike, updated for the current century.

Audio seems broken now, maybe hugged to death. Console:

  HTTP load failed with status 404. Load of media resource https://iminafleeting.com/media/people/standup-a.mp4 failed

Do people in offices typically just blast meetings out of their computer speakers? Everyone I work with uses headphones so we're not disturbing other people in the office...

Truly uncanny!

Only the British audio works for me, though - if I try American or International, the relevant meetings are silent with a "Join Audio" button which doesn't appear to do anything. (Firefox on MacOS, if that's useful)

> Want to feature your product in a fake meeting? > Advertise with us →

Best monetization strategy for a shitpost I've ever seen!

Some decades ago there was an actual product you could buy that did the analog version of this service. It was a cassette tape with various background noises, so you could call your boss or spouse from a payphone and play background noise from (for example) a car mechanic’s shop while you explained that you’re not coming because your car broke down. The auto repair recording had a convincing mix of clanging, hammering, and car engine sounds, but there were a dozen other scenarios to choose from on the tape.

Great idea, but the voice or rhythm of the conversation still does not feel authentic. Might fool someone if it's in the background though.

What are all the names for the category of such software... "Self-defense Software", "Busy Simulation Software", "Faux Work Software", "Fake Meeting Software"[0], "Virtual Meeting Simulator"[1], "Prank Screens"[2], ...? Are there many others?

[0]: https://fakemeeting.app/

[1]: https://z.tools/t/fake-meeting

[2]: https://www.whitescreen.online/

This is quite relaxing as background noise I can safely ignore and work on my project in piece. Working solo all day at home can eat into my sanity :)

It's basically big corp ASMR.

We need a fake teams / zoom UI with faces talking. You know, for those working in open plan.

Voices sound too well recorded, and professionally coached. Theses sound like robotic voice-over artists or narrators. Normal people don't talk this clearly or have microphones set up this well.

Where's the HR-faced "Can everyone turn on their cameras please?" one with 200 people in the call.

Brilliant, this website is blocked at my work: "This content is blocked by your organization".

If you can't tell people you want to concentrate on your work, there's either something very wrong with where you work, or you.

I retired a few months ago. These calls have taken me back to the horror of working in tech. It must be what PTSD is like.

Make it a Zoom UI and I’m subscribing right now.

Not sure I understand the site. Each option just shows a grid of names (like a Zoom call) but there's no audio or video. The "How It Works" section implies there's audio at least, but not working on Desktop Firefox / Linux.

A great future feature would be able to generate my own audio using AI on the topic I want and overlay it on this.

This is the greatest use of AI that I've seen so far - thank you :)

Fantastic product! Needs people talking over each other for greater authenticity, I reckon.

This is hilarious but that API Design Review meeting is stressful AF. I can't have that on speaker anywhere near me and concentrate on anything else meaningful. Human voices are incredibly distracting unless there are enough of them to create a general background wall of sound - if I can pick out what individuals are saying, that's no bueno.

Trying to access this site on my corporate Windows laptop and it was blocked "by your IT admin" (in Windows itself, not the browser/proxy). So it's already on some kind of list.

So they focus-worked only on Friday 8am to 11am? I usually barely arrive to the office by 11am.

I've just spent 20 minutes listening to a conversation about John Carol. Did you know...

This is great, and the modern equivalent of the ancient "Fake Progress Bar" app that you could have on screen for the reassurance of bosses walking past.

Maybe a silly question, but without video isn't this obviously fake? Or is it normal for all participants on a call to be audio only?

The audio level is quite high...I had to set my speakers audio level down to 20% so as not to annoy the cats

This is a hysterical idea and I love it. I have no need for it because wfh, but its so funny.

It made me realize how easy to would be to build your own custom version of the audio. Feed your corporate approved LLM some content to generate a script on, to mention your company name, your products, your stupid internal codenames because some exec thinks they are clever. Nothing secret of course, and have it generate a bunch of mindless chatter. "Ah yes, lets circle back about Project Panamax, the expected delivery in Q2 is pushed back to Q3 due to the release of the new Guard feature".

This is hilarious except not a single of the AI generated voices have Indian, russian or south american accents in any of the SRE, Software or API meetings so immediately suspect :) -also everybody is extrovert?

Listening to so many white-coded american voices talk about APIs has never happened in any American company I have ever worked for (Except maybe the Fed Gov)

-please do the needful

https://iminafleeting.com/?v=en-US&m=api

It’s all with a British accent though ... it won't fly for long!

This is not making me feel good about the real meetings I'm regularly in.

For maximum plausibility, can you please add the "scope deliverable asset" lady voice track?

This is fun. The audio isn’t particularly believable. Not that it matters for this project.

I’ve used a few tts providers and although a technical marvel they are all still easily identifiable as ai. Humans are very good at spotting fakes.

This project might work better with mostly canned audio clips of real humans.

I’ve disabled adsense so you guys can enjoy it with UX in mind - tho I have allowed for adverts to sneak into the meetings cough

Simple solution for focus time. If it stops people from setting up an actual meeting for something that fits in an email, it is already doing critical infrastructure work.

I am missing something about how this could hypothetically be useful. If I played this in the background it would be far too distracting to get any actual work done.

Audio doesn't work...

Reminds me of the fake Windows Update page.

Or just follow Alberta Tech’s lead: https://youtube.com/shorts/FLz04Wr14AM?is=T1UpCpKLJPwd5PuS

Zen moment activated :)

Please add other language versions! Should be easy to do, and would help us from non-English speaking countries.

Wait a second is that ad thing ironical? Not a big fan of covert advertising.

Minor but when I took myself off mute, my box didn't reflect that. Not sure if bug or a feature.

why would I want to be on fake meetings when I'm already in so many real meetings

I'm not getting any audio, bunch of 404s on loop.m4a... anyone else?

EDIT: seems like British audio does work

Genius. The people need an MS Teams UI option :O

This is super creative!

All Hands:

Worker: "I'd like to ask about pay review. The numbers look really strong, and some people are probably wondering if that's going to show up in review."

Exec: "That's a great question. I don't want to say anything I can't promise, but we're going to be looking at all our options and I'm sure we're going to look to reward great performance. Does that help answer your question?"

Sketch comedy writers, look out. This thing is sadly, hilariously, accurate.

Awesome, if I worked in the UK.

Where is the one with the senior staff who dont know how to mute (nobody wants to lose their job by mentioning it), has what sounds like a blender next to the microphone and occasionally yells at their dog to get off the couch?

Sorry, I cannot hear you, I'm kinda busy, K-kinda busy..

For those who don't need the audio and just need to look like busy on teams, there is still the possibility to start a meeting with yourself from the calender.

This is what I do if I kneed quite tunnel-time.

Every time I participated in corporate business calls I wondered "where these people take all these sentences and words from?". Now I know, they were computers.

is this the hacker typer of the new gen?

Nice, it's got real Interdimensional Cable vibes.

coming from someone who is the farthest from an ai hater, these zero effort cookie cutter one shot claude sites are just bleh. Why would I bother using the site if you put in 0 effort

is this what other peoples meetings are like? huh.

The ‘mixed’ accent option appears to be just British after all

Usefull!

what a fucking stupid meetings with stupid accents and stupid people talking stupid corporate shit making it sound like they are engineering a rocket. ffs, you are the plumbers writing the cruds.

smart meetings have `pauses`, `thoughts` and `i don't knows`. this is so fucking stupid that i find it lame enough not to use it.

I'm gonna ironically make a Claude theme and use that if I ever hand write a site again. :)

needs more "hmms" and "uhms" to sound believable... this is all fairly flat and evenly cadenced

This is the new BS generator, but more useful

This is hilarious, but I think people should be addressing the real issue instead of this, maybe that work environment isn’t for you and it’s time to look somewhere if you need to pretend. Just say you’re busy or fill your calendar with whatever you are working on without a meeting, in fact, a lot of meetings is a sign of a wasted time so if I see someone (especially technical) is doing a lot of meeting I know they are wasting time or slacking.

bro, that's cool. My friends disturb me a lot while working. This would definitely help

haha, now I can always use this website if I don't want to be interrupted lol

Can we just be honest?

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