The meeting that could have been an email

Every developer knows how this starts. Someone appears beside your desk with the immortal words, “Got five minutes?” Before you know it you’re trapped in a meeting room with no agenda, no clear objective, and a conversation that somehow drifts from a minor bug fix into a full-scale debate about architecture, process, company strategy, and whether Jira tickets are a social construct. An hour in, your water bottle is empty, your coffee is cold, and your will to live is being version-controlled into oblivion.

By the two-hour mark you’ve checked the clock so many times it qualifies as monitoring. The code you were actually working on sits untouched while fourteen people repeatedly circle the same point from slightly different angles. No decisions are made, no actions are assigned, and the only concrete deliverable is a follow-up meeting. The original five-minute question remains unanswered, but everyone leaves with a profound appreciation for how much software could have been written during the time spent discussing writing software.

AI was used to render the cartoon because I’m really bad at drawing anything more than stick figures