About | Should Have Been An Email

What this is

Should Have Been An Email is a satirical toolbox about office culture. It publishes small, free, single-purpose tools and reference pages built around one observation: an enormous amount of professional life is spent in meetings that everyone privately agrees did not need to happen, and almost nobody has written that down properly.

So we did. There is a calculator that tells you what a meeting is costing in salary while you sit in it. There is a checker that decides whether you actually needed to be on that email. There is a generator for the performance review sentence you have been staring at for forty minutes. And there is a growing field guide of corporate vocabulary, meeting excuses, and the specific phrases that get said in conference rooms, annotated with what they mean rather than what they say.

None of it is a product. There is nothing to buy, nothing to sign up for, and no version of this site with a subscription tier. It is a joke that got large enough to need a menu.

Important: independence and trademarks

This site is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or connected to Microsoft Corporation, Google LLC, or Zoom Communications, Inc., or with any other company whose products are named anywhere on this site.

Where those names appear, they appear descriptively, to identify the products readers actually use, in the way a review or a piece of commentary names its subject. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners. No page here reproduces, imitates for the purpose of confusion, or claims any association with the software it discusses.

Everything on this site is satire and commentary. Nothing here is legal, financial, HR, or employment advice, and no output from any tool should be presented to an employer as a fact. The salary figures in the cost calculator are market averages used to make a rhetorical point about time, not a compensation benchmark.

Why it exists

The honest version: the calendar got worse and complaining about it stopped being funny in conversation. There is a particular kind of professional exhaustion that comes not from hard work but from watching a day get eaten in thirty-minute pieces, and it is very difficult to explain to anyone who has not experienced it. Jokes travel further than complaints do. A number travels further than a joke.

The pattern that keeps recurring across everything published here is recognition. The funniest thing we can do is describe an ordinary meeting accurately. The whiteboard that never finishes loading, the raised hand nobody calls on, the retro sticky note that just says communication for the fourth sprint running. None of that is exaggerated. Exaggeration would make it less funny, because the point is that this is what actually happens.

Editorial standards

These are the rules the site is written under, and they are the reason we are willing to put them on a public page:

Everything is written by hand. Every joke, definition, excuse, and page of copy on this site was drafted and edited by a person. The site publishes at volume, but volume is not an excuse for output nobody read before it went live. Anything that reads as a weaker rephrase of something already published gets cut rather than shipped.
We punch at corporate culture, not at people. The target is always a process, a format, or a habit. No real named individual is the subject of a joke here, and no page mocks anyone for who they are as opposed to what their calendar does to them.
No content that coaches deception. The tools are props, focus screens, and jokes. Nothing published here instructs a reader to mislead an employer, a colleague, or anyone else, and material that drifted in that direction has been removed rather than softened.
Named products are described, never impersonated. We write about software the way a critic writes about a film. The prose is specific about products because vague satire is bad satire, but nothing is designed to be mistaken for the real interface.
Corrections are made in place. If something here is wrong, unfair, or lands worse than intended, tell us and we will change it. Pages carry their last-updated date where that date matters.

What is here

Meeting Cost Calculator Add attendees and a duration. Watch the salary burn accumulate in real time. The most-shared thing we have ever published, mostly by people forwarding it to the person who called the meeting.

Email Relevance Checker Answers the question you ask yourself eleven times a day: was I on this thread because I am needed, or because somebody hit reply-all.

Performance Review Generator For the annual sentence about your growth areas that you have now rewritten six times and made steadily worse.

The Field Guide The reference half of the site. Corporate vocabulary translated into what it actually means, meeting excuses that hold up, bingo cards, and meeting simulator presets.

Who publishes it

Should Have Been An Email is published as a CubicleComa production, an independent web publishing project with no corporate parent, no investors, and a staff small enough to fit in a meeting that genuinely should have been an email.

The site is funded by advertising, which is why there is advertising on it. That is the whole business model, stated plainly so that nobody has to guess. How advertising and analytics handle your data is set out on the privacy page, in more detail than is strictly customary, because the alternative is a site that jokes about corporate evasiveness while practising it.

There is currently no contact channel, which the staff regards less as an omission than as a lifestyle. If that changes, a contact page will appear in the footer.