Any time someone at work says I’ll ping you, I want to respond in a horrible Russian accent that only Sean Connery can do: “one ping, one ping only.”

A ping is a sound wave sent from a submarine to its surroundings. The sound wave bounces off things and returns to the submarine. They do this to tell the distance of things. It’s like echo-location.

That implies that if a manager pings me, they want their message to hit me and bounce back at them so that they can tell the distance of themselves from me.

I’m told I’m loud all the time. The LAST thing I want to know is how long it takes my voice to hit something and bounce back. I prefer my voice be absorbed and not bounce back! I don’t need to hear me back to me to know I exist. And, anyone who hears me definitely should absorb every last meaningful word I say — which is really what a manager wants but doesn’t know how to achieve, otherwise they wouldn’t be pinging in the first place!

I am, of course, a hypocrite and I use that word at work at minimum 105 times a day, though I average 97 ± 31.

Each of my 97 ± 31 daily pings represents carefully chosen words that I feel disappear into a dark abyss — I need to know if anyone’s still there!

I should do better. One ping, one ping only, as most people at work don’t react well to more than that.

Last modified on 2026-01-31