Incident Record: Leave Button Hesitation
Someone waits for someone senior to exit before clicking leave.
Incident Record: Leave Button Hesitation Date of Incident: Third Tuesday of March 2022
Summary of Events
The call concluded. The senior person said, well, I think that covers everything. This is the conventional signal. The subject moved the cursor to the Leave button. The subject did not click.
The subject was waiting.
The waiting was not for more content. The content had ended. The waiting was positional: the subject did not want to be the first to leave because being the first to leave, after a call in which the subject's participation had been moderate, might register as disengagement. The subject's participation had not been disengaged. The subject had been listening. This was not visible.
First Consequence
The first case of leave button hesitation changes one small decision without being discussed. The subject now positions the cursor near the Leave button during the closing minutes of calls, to reduce the latency between the social permission to leave and the act of leaving. Preparation is not hesitation. Preparation is the correct response to hesitation identified in a previous incident.
Second Consequence
After repetition, other people begin adjusting their behavior around leave button hesitation. A colleague who was previously the first to leave on every call has also begun waiting. Neither party has disclosed this practice to the other. Both are waiting for the senior person, who has noticed that nobody leaves immediately and has begun closing calls more explicitly to release people from what the senior person has correctly identified as a social holding pattern.
The senior person says, okay, take care everyone, which is now the formal release.
Third Consequence
Eventually leave button hesitation acquires an unwritten enforcement system that everyone denies creating. Leaving before the release phrase now has a slightly different social texture than it did before the release phrase existed. The phrase did not exist a year ago. It emerged from the accumulated social pressure of people not leaving and was designed to solve the problem it was created by. It has created a new norm, which is that leaving without it is now notable.
Nobody proposed this. It passed anyway.
The Absurd Rule
Meeting etiquette is valid whenever enough people copy a behavior before anyone names it. The behavior requires no announcement. It requires only a critical mass of people performing it simultaneously in a way that creates the social cost of deviation.
The Contradiction
The call is meant to simplify coordination, yet everyone spends energy managing how participation looks.
The call has ended. The subject clicks Leave. The call lasted forty-two minutes. Approximately three of those minutes were spent in various forms of leave-adjacent management. In 2022, this was the standard cost of remote work participation, and it was not included in any meeting's official duration.