Middle-Aged Man Posts 40 TGIF Memes On Teams To Confirm Coworkers Still Occupy Physical Reality

In what experts described as “a normal workplace behavior if you don’t think about it,” a middle-aged man posted 40 TGIF memes in Microsoft Teams Friday morning to see if anyone would respond in a way that suggests they still occupy physical reality.

The memes came in waves: dancing cartoons, “IT’S FRIDAY” in aggressive fonts, a golden retriever holding a beer at 9:07 a.m., and a Minion image that looked like it had been forwarded since the dawn of email.

By meme #12, the man stopped believing in joy and started believing in ritual.

Because every weekday now has its assigned emotion and its assigned JPEG. Monday is coffee. Wednesday is “hump day.” Thursday is “almost there.” Friday is the same five images traveling office-to-office like migrating birds made of pixels.

At meme #19, he deployed a Garfield “I ❤️ Mondays” image—on a Friday—just to test if anybody was actually reading, or if the office had become a room of automated reactions clicking emojis out of muscle memory.

Three coworkers responded with 👍.
One replied “lol” (the corporate equivalent of breathing).
Another reacted with 😂, which in Teams translates to: I acknowledge your presence. Please don’t ask me to be a person right now.

By meme #33, he posted a GIF of a raccoon falling off a trash can labeled “ME LEAVING WORK TODAY,” which was the closest thing to honesty anyone shared all week.

His final meme—#40—was a plain black square with white text:

IF YOU CAN SEE THIS, YOU ARE REAL.

Four people reacted with 🎉.

No one used words.

The man leaned back, satisfied. Not because it was funny, but because the ritual had been completed—and rituals are basically the last thing keeping Teams, time, and reality stitched together.