MINNEAPOLIS — A research team has concluded an eighteen-month study of a corporate campus by confirming what employees have long suspected: every conference room named after a tree or mountain was booked by someone else until 4 p.m.

The study, which examined 41 rooms bearing names such as Aspen, Denali, Sequoia, and Mount Rainier Annex, found no instance in which a room was both available and large enough for the meeting in question. Rooms that were available, researchers noted, were named after nothing and seated two.

“We walked every floor, twice a day, for a year and a half,” said Dr. Marguerite Oyelaran-Pfenning, senior fellow in Applied Calendar Disappointment at the Institute for Lateral Office Studies. “At no point did we see a meeting actually occurring. We saw only the booking.”

The team’s primary evidence came from Redwood, a mid-sized room on the third floor, where a single man was observed eating a sandwich on 212 of 214 visits. The calendar listed the room as reserved for “Q3 Strategic Alignment Sync (Hold).” Researchers said no strategy was visible.

“He made eye contact once,” said research assistant Tobias Lindqvist-Amadi, who peered through the frosted glass for a cumulative 61 hours. “Then he turned his sandwich slightly away from us. We took that as a no.”

The study also documented a phenomenon the authors call the “Phantom Hold,” in which a room is reserved by an employee who left the company in 2021. Researchers found that three of the campus’s five largest rooms were still booked weekly by a former regional manager, whose recurring invite, titled “Sync,” has no listed attendees and no agenda.

Efforts to reserve a room directly proved similarly fruitless. In one trial, researchers booked Kilimanjaro for 2 p.m., arrived at 1:58, and found a group of six already inside, none of whom had a reservation or appeared to be doing anything. “They said they’d ‘just be a minute,’” Oyelaran-Pfenning said. “That was in March.”

“The calendar is not a record of what is happening. It is a record of what someone once feared might happen.”

Campus facilities director Rodney Valkenburg-Osei, whose title is Vice President of Spatial Experience, disputed the findings, noting that the company recently added a room-booking app that displays availability in real time. “The app shows green for open and red for booked,” he said. “Currently it shows red for all rooms, including the one it is running on.”

Valkenburg-Osei said the company has responded by naming five new rooms after a hill, a shrub, and three varieties of moss, which he said “should relieve pressure on the mountains.” All five were booked by 9:15 a.m. on the day the names were announced.

The researchers recommend that employees seeking a meeting space simply hold the meeting in a hallway, a strategy that has so far gone unchallenged. They also urged anyone who sees the man in Redwood to leave him be.

“He’s not hurting anyone,” said Lindqvist-Amadi. “And honestly, his sandwich looks great.”

The study will be presented at a conference, which has not yet found a room.