Slack Laughter Is Becoming a Problem
What to do when your co-workers aren’t laughing with you or at you but around you
Is there any sound more anxiety-inducing than the ding of the seatbelt sign on a plane? The brief click that happens before your alarm clock’s soothing piano starts to play? The sound of the person behind you in a movie theater wetly chewing a banana?
None of those sounds compare to the total horror of several co-workers simultaneously bursting into laughter over something on their computers that you can’t see. Slackter. Slack is a useful workplace instant messaging platform, but for anyone with social anxiety, it’s a digital prison: 90% of the conversations that happen on Slack are worthless, but you can’t log off, lest you miss the essential 10%.
You look through every Slack group you’re in to see if perhaps you were included in the in-joke. You weren’t. You consider the factors that might unite the laughers: Are they working on the same project together? Are they in a fantasy football league? No, they’re not. Nothing unites them — you didn’t even know those three people were friends. There is, you realize, a 100% chance that they have a private Slack group devoted to making fun of you. They hate you. You’re going to be fired tomorrow, and everyone knows it.
