(For the record: Our office has neither.) It is the work environment you have when you’re stuck at your desk for hours and can’t hover by the glorious office plant wall or the craft beer taps in the kitchen.

At a time when more people are working jobs behind screens, sometimes remotely in distributed workplaces, Slack is the new office watercooler. Slack does that too, but online rather than in a physical space.

Better yet, think of coworking space provider WeWork, with its promise of delivering office culture as a service. Think of AOL Instant Messenger, but for people with jobs. Marie Kondo tries to get my digital life in order

It is the bane of my existence and also, at times, the only salve for a stressful day. Slack is many things: an engine for collaboration and a distraction machine a community-builder for an office and a facsimile of high school cliques a service to streamline work and to blur the lines of your work/life balance. But that barely scratches the surface of its impact on teams, internet culture and, most importantly of all, my own damn life. Most of the time, Slack is described blandly as a workplace communication tool. Congratulations, you have probably made better life choices than I have. If you don’t know what Slack is, chances are you don’t work in media or tech. I typed many words in response to those messages - some of them even borderline good words - but came no closer to completing my job for the day: writing this article about Slack. In the time it took me to type this sentence about Slack, I received more than a dozen messages in a private Slack group and more posts than I can count in several team channels.

Party parrot slack