Four people around a table that wobbles on one short leg, and nobody will be the one to fix it. Somebody has opened a shared document on a laptop and turned it so we can all watch the cursor blink. It blinks a long time. The task is not hard. Assign the sections, agree on a deadline, leave. We have been here forty minutes.
What's happening, mostly, is that everyone is waiting to see how much they can get away with not doing without another person noticing and resenting them for it. There's a whole silent arithmetic under the small talk. Who spoke first, who has an excuse ready, who is quietly deciding they'll just redo everyone's part themselves at 2 a.m. rather than have the argument now. I know that person. I have been that person.
Up there you learn fast that the crew is the only thing keeping you alive, and that everyone's slack becomes someone else's extra load, and there is nowhere to hide it, because the whole cabin you're breathing is smaller than this conference room. You get honest very quickly. You have to. There's no version where you privately resent the guy at the other end of the station and still make it home.
Down here we have the luxury of pretending our air is infinite and our time is somebody else's problem. So we stall. We wait each other out over a slide deck.
The thing I keep looking at is that short table leg. Any one of us could shove a folded napkin under it in three seconds and stop the wobble for everyone.
We just keep choosing to feel it rock instead.