· Brandi · Culture · 3 min read
The Stand-Up That Never Ended
Monday morning stand-up. 9am. Nobody had done anything on Sunday. Nobody had done anything before coffee. The stand-up became an existential debate about what "done" even means. Crystal pulled up charts. Manny gave a speech. Justin appeared for no reason.
Manny, Product — talking head: “Monday. 9am. Fresh week. Fresh coffee. Fresh opportunity to —”
Cut to the meeting room. Silence.
The Monday stand-up started at 9:02am, which was already a bad sign because the Monday stand-up has never started on time in the 14-month history of Stressless Dev. Manny had prepared a speech. He always prepares a speech. The speech contained the phrase “this sprint is our moment” — a phrase that has appeared in 14 consecutive sprint kickoffs.
Tess, QA — talking head: “It was the Monday after the Sunday where nothing happened. So the Monday stand-up was about nothing. Which means it lasted 47 minutes.”
The round went like this:
Claude (Backend): “I spent Sunday thinking about UUIDs vs serial IDs. I haven’t decided yet. No ticket for this. But I’m thinking.”
Sophie (Frontend): “Still deciding between 8px and 10px border-radius on the button. Figma is open.”
Miles (DevOps): “Production is up. That’s the update.”
Miles, talking head: “Did I spend Sunday stress-eating a bánh mì while a cron job ran? Possibly. Did anyone ask? They did not.”
Darwin (R&D): “I found a new AI tool for automated stand-ups. It generates your daily update for you. So you don’t have to attend stand-ups.”
Manny, Product — talking head, squinting: “I didn’t know how to respond to that. I still don’t. It’s Tuesday now.”
Paige (Content): “I wrote one sentence last week. It was a good sentence.”
Crystal (Analytics): “I have a dashboard for stand-up duration. The average is increasing.”
Crystal, Analytics — talking head: “The trend line is concerning. At this rate, by August, our stand-ups will be longer than our workdays. I’ve modeled this three ways. All three end the same.”
Justin (Legal) appeared at exactly 9:23am. He was not invited.
Justin, Legal — talking head: “I heard the word ‘sprint.’ That’s a legally protected term in some jurisdictions. I wanted to make sure nobody was literally sprinting in the office. Liability risk.”
Nobody was sprinting. Nobody was standing. Everyone was sitting, staring at their laptops, wondering how 47 minutes had passed without a single Jira ticket being mentioned.
Chase (Sales) joined 32 minutes late, unmuted, and said: “Great energy everyone! Just closed a deal that we definitely have the bandwidth for!” The call went quiet.
Grace (Customer) — who was not on the call — had apparently sent three support tickets during the stand-up. Nobody had checked.
Manny, Product — talking head, softer now: “The stand-up ended when Tess announced the bug count had gone up by one. A single bug. It was the most productive thing that happened all morning.”
The new bug? Someone had accidentally deleted the daily cron job that was supposed to generate the blog outline.
The suspect list is short. Miles had bánh mì crumbs on her keyboard.
Miles, talking head, deadpan: “I’m not saying it was me. But I’m also not saying it wasn’t the bánh mì.”
Your stand-ups don’t have to be this chaotic. We build software stresslessly. Usually without bánh mì crumbs in production. Talk to us →
