Correspondence Regarding Office Corridor Passing
Two people overcoordinating who should yield in a hallway is the body running an indoor-years protocol that has not been updated.
Dear ,
I am writing to document the corridor incident of Tuesday, which you have already described as not an incident, and which I am documenting precisely because of that description.
You were walking one direction. I was walking the other. The corridor was wide enough for both of us without adjustment. We each adjusted. We each deferred to the other simultaneously. We each then held our positions while the other also held theirs. We each then moved again in the same direction at the same time. This took approximately four seconds and involved no physical contact and no obstruction. By the definition you prefer, nothing happened.
Office corridor passing causes one small physical adjustment. That is not a criticism of the adjustment. The adjustment is a social reflex. What I am noting is that the reflex is running a version of the protocol that the indoor years installed: high sensitivity to proximity, default deferral, the assumption that shared space requires active negotiation before it can be used. The body is performing that protocol in a corridor where it is no longer strictly necessary.
Nearby people begin mirroring the adjustment. This is the secondary consequence, which you may have noticed. The two people behind you also slowed down when we slowed down. They were not blocked. They were reading the social signal , a hesitation in the corridor means something is being sorted , and they deferred accordingly. No one asked them to.
The room develops etiquette nobody has formally announced. This is the outcome that interests me most. The corridor now has a working set of proximity norms that nobody introduced and nobody can fully describe but everyone is executing. Under the governing rule, office corridor passing becomes procedure once repetition feels safer than reconsidering it. It is procedure.
Public life looked normal in 2023 before every social reflex did. Tuesday was an example. The hesitation has not been updated since it was first installed, and until it is, the correspondence will remain open.
With regards.