To the Meeting Room

At Min Guhong Manufacturing, meetings are not scheduled. No one first suggests having one, and no one later says that what happened was a meeting. A meeting always begins in the middle of itself, and turns into something else before it ends: lunch, perhaps, a conversation about an intern’s personal worries, or a count of the oranges left in the office refrigerator. That is why the company keeps no minutes.

Min Guhong Manufacturing has no fixed meeting room. It might be in front of a monitor, or on a bench during a walk. Sometimes meetings have taken place in a tab opened while writing an email, or in an “Untitled document” on Google Drive. Recently, one occurred inside a <details> tag on the company’s official website. Its heading was “We Are in a Meeting,” and the text appeared only when clicked. It read: “Can we still call this a meeting?”

Even the participants are uncertain. Nominally, only the operator attends, but the voices of outsiders often enter the meeting. These voices usually arrive from emails received earlier, sentences drawn from books, or a joke casually made by the company’s host. A meeting is thus closer to an echo than a monologue. It flows on without anyone knowing who spoke first or who laughed last.

The main agenda is always much the same. Should About the Company be rewritten? Should a letter that has not received a reply be sent again? Should the intern be treated to lunch? Is the company name too long? Is it finally time to file for closure? Occasionally, a very specific item comes up: “In Min Guhong Manufacturing’s typographic rules, how much space should be left on either side of an en dash or em dash?” Discussing this took forty minutes. During the meeting, the operator closed the Google Doc and went to the supermarket to buy apples. The minutes contain only the word “sagwa”—which in Korean can mean either an apple or an apology. Two years after the meeting, it is still unclear which was intended. Meetings generally conclude with: “We have decided nothing, but I hope everyone had a good time.”

Of course, there is only one participant. At Min Guhong Manufacturing, one person can call a meeting, conduct it, grow frustrated, wrap it up, and then deny that it ever took place. Meetings are that fluid, and that uneventful. Curiously, though, it is after just such a meeting that the company releases a new product, changes the website’s structure, or sometimes rewrites its introduction without realizing it. And so people say that a Min Guhong Manufacturing meeting says nothing, yet somehow ends up deciding something.

The meeting may be over. Or perhaps it has yet to begin.