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NEW YORK — A sweeping, eighteen-month investigation conducted jointly by McKinsey & Company, Deloitte, and a third firm that asked not to be named because it is also under investigation has concluded that the phrase 'circling back,' used approximately 4.7 billion times per business day across corporate America, has been physically rotating emails in a closed orbital path around their intended recipients since the expression entered common workplace usage in approximately 2003.

The report, titled 'Where Did All The Emails Go: A 340-Page Answer To The Question Nobody Thought To Ask,' confirms that every email sent with the stated intention of 'circling back' enters what researchers are calling a 'corporeal loop state,' in which the message travels in a widening ellipse around the recipient's inbox, gaining speed but never actually arriving.

'We modeled it. We stress-tested it. We brought in a physicist from MIT who asked us to please stop calling him,' said Dr. Randall Couch, Senior Principal of Emerging Workplace Dynamics at Deloitte, speaking from what appeared to be a fortified bunker. 'The emails are out there. They are circling. And based on our trajectory models, several of them will complete their orbits sometime around 2031.'

The findings have sent shockwaves through the business community, with many executives noting that the revelation explains a great deal.

'I sent a follow-up to our Q3 vendor proposal in October of 2019 and told them I'd circle back by end of week,' said Patricia Hemming, Chief Operations Officer at a mid-sized logistics company in Columbus, Ohio, who requested her last name be used because she 'wants credit for figuring this out first.' 'I never heard back. They never heard back. I assumed it was a culture fit issue. Turns out it was orbital mechanics.'

The report estimates that approximately 14 trillion emails are currently in active circulation above North American time zones alone, forming what researchers describe as 'a dense, low-altitude ring of unresolved action items' that may be partially responsible for disruptions in certain GPS signals and at least one regional airline's persistent delays out of Dallas.

Experts were quick to explain why this was always the correct interpretation of the phrase.

'Language is literal until proven otherwise,' explained Dr. Meryl Stanton, Chair of Corporate Linguistics at the University of Phoenix Online Campus Annex. 'When someone says they'll loop you in, we now have footage. When someone says they'll keep you in the pipeline, there is a pipe. We are still locating it.'

McKinsey has recommended that companies immediately replace 'circling back' with 'sending a normal email like a person,' though internal sources indicate that a two-year pilot program will be required before full implementation, during which time they will need to circle back on the findings.

The report's authors say a follow-up study is already underway examining whether 'taking this offline' has been disconnecting conversations from the internet, and early results are, according to one researcher who called from what sounded like a very quiet room, 'not great.'