Sender[NULL]
If only this meeting could've been an email. (B-Side #6)
A workplace horror story about a meeting invite with no sender and no way to cancel.
I’ve heard stories about my workplace being haunted but never had any experiences myself.
Most of what I heard came from the nightshift crew. It was the typical spooky stuff - disembodied voices, tools mysteriously disappearing, loud clanging sounds from empty rooms and things knocked over.
When it kept happening, the guys started calling the ghost Reggie. Reggie wasn’t the name of a long-dead former employee; Reggie worked in maintenance and was very much alive, but there was a running joke that no one ever saw Reggie actually working, so those phantom sounds must be him getting his work done.
It was a running joke that whenever something was out of place or they heard a loud banging in the back of the shop by the boilers, one of them would say “Sounds like ol’ Reggie’s getting after it!” If he was in earshot, the non-specter Reggie would respond with an indignant “Fuck you.”
I worked in the office, but my job as Health and Safety Coordinator required frequent trips to the shop floor for inspections, training, and investigations whenever there was an injury or we put the wrong thing down the drain. Due to the ghost’s notoriety, “Reggie did it” was typically one of the first root cause findings I’d have to rule out. And rule it out we did, because up until then if there was a ghost in the building, his antics had been harmless.
The day the notifications began was just like any other, with no signs or warnings that things were about to turn sour. I returned to my desk from my monthly briefing on trip and fall hazards when I heard the chime for a meeting request on my computer.
New Meeting Request
Subject: 💀
Location: Your Office
Date: Tomorrow
Time: 5pm
I was so drawn to the odd meeting topic I overlooked something important about the invite. At first I wasn’t at all creeped out by it; I figured one of the guys found a computer still logged in and sent an invite to everyone in the company as a prank.
That’s when I noticed what was off about the invite. It didn’t have a sender.
Rather than send a reply all to start a company wide trolling email thread, I clicked Decline. Instead of deleting the meeting invite, it returned an error message: Unable to Send: Sender[Null].
I tried again and received the same Sender[Null] error. A third try, same result. So I just deleted it.
I went to get coffee and ended up getting sidetracked into a conversation about the previous night’s basketball game with some of the second shift crew waiting to clock in. I was gone for maybe fifteen minutes. When I returned, my inbox was flooded with meeting invites.
I shared an office wall with Eugene the resident IT guy so I called him over to have a look.
“Did you get any weird emails or click on any links?” Eugene asked as he sat at my computer.
“No,” I replied.
We get phishing test emails once a month, so I knew not to click anything weird. Eugene used his admin privileges to run diagnostics just to make sure.
“Weird. Server logs show the origin of the invites are internal,” Eugene said, then leaned back slightly. “The calls are coming from inside the house.”
“Funny,” I said. “Does it show who’s sending them?”
Eugene scrolled through his data and shook his head. “Nope, it doesn’t say, not even in the header data. No time stamps either. Did you try declining the meeting?”
“I tried, but it gives an error message.”
Whether he didn’t believe me or just wanted to see for himself, he tried declining one of the many invites and received the Unable to Send: Sender[Null] message.
“Sender[Null], what is that?” I asked.
“Null is the absence of data. It expects a value in that field but there isn’t one. Does this work?”
He highlighted all of the meeting invites and clicked Delete. Poof! They were gone.
“There you go,” he said, then clicked on another menu header and started typing. “I set up an Inbox filter to move all of those to a folder so they don’t clog up your inbox. I also set it to autodelete everything in the folder when you close the program. Might have to reset something on the server, probably some bullshit code the previous guy forgot to clear out. There, all set.”
When he got up from my computer, the invites were gone, but now I had an extra folder in the sidebar below the rest of my mailbox folders. He named it Reggie. I gave him a look.
“What?” Eugene shrugged. “You’re getting ghost emails, maybe it’s him?”
He ducked out of the office as I whipped a pen at his head.
“That’s not very safe!” he yelled through the office wall.
The rest of the day passed without incident. Before I closed my computer down that night I checked the Reggie folder to see how many invites were there. It was over a thousand in a little over three hours. I closed the program, then reopened it just to check that Eugene’s fix worked. They were all gone.
When I returned to work the next day, I checked the Reggie folder expecting it to be overflowing with notifications. To my surprise it was empty. I figured that meant Eugene did his server magic and cleared out whatever error was sending me phantom meeting invites. Problem solved, I put it out of my mind and it was business as usual.
Most of the office was cleared out by 4:30. Normally I would be gone as well, but that day I had a meeting at six with the off-shift supervisor about closing out action items from a forklift incident. I closed my office door, put my headphones in and worked on reports while I waited for him to get in.
At 4:55 my computer chimed and a notification popped up:
Meeting reminder: 💀 in 5 minutes
I’d be lying if I said my heart didn’t skip a beat when I saw it.
I rechecked the Reggie folder. It had refilled with thousands of new meeting invitations, but with one small change. Unlike yesterday, they were all flagged High Importance.
I scrolled down the folder, highlighting all of the messages to delete them. No sooner had I highlighted them all and hit delete did a new batch of invites show up, all for 5 pm, all flagged as High Importance.
The meeting subject, however, had changed from 💀 to 💀💀💀. The skulls were red.
“What the fuck is this?” I said aloud, trying to understand what was going on.
I got up to check if Eugene was still here when my desktop chimed, popping up a new notification.
Meeting reminder: 💀💀💀 - now.
I froze, looking up at my office door. Below the doorway, I could see the shadow of legs standing outside. I turned off the music. The office was quiet except for the faint sound of breathing just outside my office door. Wet, labored breathing.
“Hello?”
Knock-knock-knock-knock-knock-knock-knock-knock-knock-knock-knock
The door shook as whoever was outside the door pounded on it. Non-stop, over and over.
“What do you want?!” I yelled.
On cue, the meeting notification popped up again:
Meeting reminder: 💀💀💀 - 1 minute ago
“Eugene, is this you?” It had to be.He was the only one with the knowhow and access to pull off a prank like this.
The knocking stopped. I waited, holding my breath.
The shadow shifted at the bottom of the door frame.The breathing outside the door continued, as wet and as ragged as before, like the sound of someone who needs to clear their throat but never does. I crawled under my desk, moving closer to the door for a better look.
When I looked under the doorframe, I saw… nothing. Just the standard short pile carpeting I had installed two years ago because the previous carpet tiles were peeling up and becoming a trip hazard.
Even though I saw nothing, I still heard the ragged, wet breathing above me.
The pounding began anew, jarring the door so hard I thought it was going to break off the hinge and slam down on top of me.
I crawled back under my desk like a puppy experiencing lightning for the first time. The pounding grew louder and the door handle rattled as whatever was outside the door was very eager to get in.
“Go away!” I yelled, then pleaded. “Please go away!”
A reminder popup:
Meeting reminder: 💀💀💀 - four minutes ago
The skulls appeared to be bleeding with tiny red lines dripping from the subject line. The meeting invitations flooded the screen, burying everything else.
Outside the office, the breathing was replaced by a high pitched wail. The most awful sound I had ever heard, both mournful and frightening as fuck. I cupped my hands over my ears, pressing my index fingers into my ear canals to block out that horrid sound.
The door rocked on its hinges. The lights in my office pulsed, dimming to near darkness and shining so bright I could hear the hum of the fluorescent bulbs vibrating to the point that it sounded like a furious swarm of bees.
I picked up the phone. Instead of a dial tone, the sound coming from the receiver was the wail.
The door was going to shatter into pieces and the only thing between me and whatever was outside my door was my monitor screen, still displaying a cascade of bloody skull meeting invites from an unknown entity.
I opened one of the invitations, trying to find something, anything to help me.
I hit cancel.
Unable to Send: Sender[Null]
Again.
Unable to Send: Sender[Null]
My hands were shaking. My 365 Days Accident Free! coffee cup vibrated so violently that it shattered on my desk.
I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t delete it. I couldn’t cancel it.
My cursor hovered over one last option – Propose New Time
I clicked it.
Instead of an error message, my calendar opened up. I didn’t even look at the date or time, I picked one at random and hit SEND.
The door fell silent. The knocking stopped, as did the wailing.
I sat there for what felt like ages, staring at the door and the shadow outside the frame.
I jumped when I heard the chime from my computer:
Your Meeting Invitation was accepted.
The shadow disappeared as the lights in my office returned to normal. The ominous overwhelming feeling of dread that hung over the room subsided.
It wasn’t until the off shift supervisor rapped his knuckles on my door at six o’clock that I got up from my chair. I must’ve been a sight too, because he asked if we should reschedule. I nodded emphatically and got the fuck out of there, driving home.
There’s a formula we use in safety, emotional response decreases with time and distance from the event. By the time I got home, I was already talking myself out of what I’d seen.
When I returned to work the next day I was convinced that it was just a dream. I dozed off at my desk, it’s the only rational explanation. The meeting invites were gone. Eugene informed me that he did run a server update to clear out any old code that may have caused the invite glitch. The Reggie folder was still there, but it was empty.
I even checked my calendar for the alternate meeting time I had created. Nothing. Maybe I did imagine the whole thing?
The only thing left to explain was my shattered coffee mug, but it’s not uncommon for your brain to process outside stimuli - sounds, changes in temperature, voices - and fold them into the dream narrative. Besides, what was more rational: me knocking a mug over while in the midst of a hyper-realistic scary dream, or ol’ Reggie getting after it?
I put it behind me, certain it was all a creation of my own subconscious. As with all of my other root cause investigations, “Reggie” was the first suggestion, and I ruled out almost immediately.
As time passed, I was able to put the incident aside. This morning when I opened my email, the first message that popped up was a meeting reminder:
Subject: 💀💀💀
Location: Your Office
Date: Today
Time: 2pm
I tried the previous trick of proposing a new time, but each meeting proposal returned Declined. The feeling of dread returned as red lines of blood seeped down the monitor from the skulls.
I left work, wanting to be far from my office when the meeting time arrived. As I got in my car, I received a message on my phone indicating that the meeting location had changed - your car, your home, didn’t matter where I chose to go, the meeting location updated as fast as I could think of a new place to go. Out of options, I returned to work.
I’m back at my office waiting for Sender[Null] to reveal themselves. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I typed this out just in case things don’t go well for me. I wanted to leave a record of everything that led up to today so whoever does the investigation can do a thorough root cause analysis.
It’s the least I can do.
Delightful! Gave me the creeps.
I know revealing the monster could ruin it, but I'm so curious! Who is the meeting with??