How to play Milestone Race
Enter your salary — annually or hourly, whichever number you have made peace with — and tell the page how many minutes are left in the meeting you are currently in. Then call your shot: pick the milestone you think you will earn before someone says “let’s take the rest offline”.
Hit press play and the ticker races the clock. Beat your prediction and you win, which is to say you have earned an oat-milk latte and are still in the meeting. Miss it and the page tells you exactly how far short you were, usually while someone adds “one last thing”. Every milestone you pass is collected permanently on your trophy shelf, across every meeting, on every visit. Sixteen of them. They are all depressing and you will want all of them.
The bet is the whole game. Predicting the gumball is safe and shameful. Predicting the weekend away is optimistic to the point of insubordination. The interesting bracket sits somewhere near the desk lunch, where a fifteen-minute status update that has been allowed to sprawl to forty becomes, briefly, a sandwich. If you would rather not gamble, the classic open-ended ticker is still one tap away.
Field notes on getting paid to sit here
The maths is deliberately unkind. We divide by 1,880 working hours a year, which already assumes you take your holiday, which you don’t. It counts gross salary only, so the real number — the one that includes your employer’s costs, the software licence you never open, and the eleven other people on this call — is several times larger and is not shown here for reasons of public health.
What the ticker makes visible is the thing meetings are engineered to hide: cost is per person, per minute, and it does not pause when the presenter says “can everyone see my screen?”. It does not pause during the five minutes of joining noises at the top. It does not pause while a document is located. It runs during the silence after “any questions?”, which is the most expensive silence in corporate life.
Nothing you type here leaves your browser. The salary, the achievements, and the grudge are all stored locally on your own device. There is no account, no upload, and no leaderboard on which your manager could find you.
One warning from testing: once you have watched a recurring invite turn into a pair of noise-cancelling headphones in real time, you will not be able to sit through it again without doing the arithmetic. Several people have used this to justify declining. We consider that a feature.