Jitter

As a web developer, I’m asked to attend meetings.

I hate meetings.

It’s the same routine every time: a dozen people, just five of them need to be there, only three will talk, sometimes I’m one of them. They normally don’t have any agenda, and it doesn’t matter because if they had one they wouldn’t follow it.

It was 4 PM at the office, only an hour shy from the end of my workday. A little indicator popped on our chat app. It was a message. For me. CC’d to a dozen people, of course, wearing those names as cosplay of a crucial matter:

“Hey, can you join us for a quick meeting?”

Lies! Stop minimising your requests. It’s never quick.

Looking over there, some lady was rushing in her heels to the fax machine. She shoved the paper into the scanning feeder, she punched numbers in… She was not breathing—she was on autopilot. Sending that fax was urgent! It must be done immediately to meet deadlines arbitrarily set by some manager she never met! Her life depended on it! If that fax was not received within the next five minutes, the world will end!

Anyway…

I took a deep breath. I typed in the chat:

“Be right there.”

I got up in my high heels and walked. There was no rush. If it was a crisis in programming, the world can wait; the world will wait for me. The fax lady rushed by me again, carrying my long blue and green hair in her wake. If I wasn’t looking, I could have sworn a race car sped by in front of me.

I walked towards the meeting room at the back, where everyone was waiting for me. Through the glass panels, I saw seven individuals—all men of various weights, some Japanese but mostly foreigners.

I didn’t bother knocking—I swung the door open and let myself in. “It better be good, I leave in an hour. What is it?”

Yes, I sound rough. Why shouldn’t I? I’ve been doing this whole song and dance for 30 years. You want someone to be nice, polite, and cute? Hire a junior dev. You want someone getting the job done? Get a senior dev. You want someone to cut the shit and just spit it out? You hire me…

“The Webmistress!” exclaimed one of the men, staring at me like I’d just descended from the server rack. “Yes,” I responded in a low voice while trying to figure out who that was—I don’t think I’d ever seen him before. In fact, I don’t think I’d met half the people in the room.

The team lead, Naka, cut through the silence, “Rem is our technical lead. She can do anything in CSS.” I continued his introduction, “…when I feel like it.”

Naka turned to me and continued, “Rem, this is Mike and Mark. They’re developers from another team in our department. We were talking about some estimates then we were just chatting. It’s not related to the topic here, but they mentioned some problem they were having with a layout and even AI couldn’t figure it out.”

“What is it?” I asked, squeezing out a turd-sized amount of interest.

Mark took over. It surprised me, because I thought he couldn’t talk. “Okay, bro, so like we got this pop-up box right and yeah dude that box just pops up and got some text and shit in it, yeah. And like it gets cut off. Dude, I asked ChatGPT and Claude and they’re clueless. So that’s what I was saying, bro, and Naka-san was saying you’re the guy for that.”

I raised an eyebrow. First, the obvious misgendering, although I’m used to that. Second, how oblivious he was. Those AI models had swallowed half the web’s CSS documentation, probably including work by people like me. Somehow, Mark had still managed to make them useless.

“Okay, let me have a look,” I said as I turned his notebook to me, having a pretty good guess of how to fix the issue.

Mark went on, “Alright, sir. Bro, here you go. Thanks, dude.” He was fidgeting.

I clicked through his “broken” webpage and opened the developer tools to inspect it. “See, I think you just need to set overflow: auto on this <div>…” And there. It was already fixed.

“Ah, shit, bro.” Mark’s fingers twitched against the table. His words faded into background noise as I started paying attention to his movements instead. “Man, sir, that page was driving me nuts, bro. Dude, it was so annoying. You’re mah man, yeah! Sir, bro. Yeah, man, boy…”

My eyebrow elevated again. “Uh, are you okay?”

“Yeah, man, sir, bro, dude, I’m good. Even better now, mah man! Bro, thanks for the fix, dude! Man…” Mark seemed to be… glitching, somehow, like a broken tape deck caught in a three-second loop. I shot Mike, who was sitting next to him, a look. He was the one who had greeted me earlier by my royal title. “Oh hey, um, I’m Mike!” he said, shyly. “Yeah, I figured,” I replied before he went on. “Oh, I love the stuff you do!”

Glancing back and forth between Mike and Mark, with my eyebrow getting sore after rising for a third time, I grew a bit concerned. “Uh, what’s wrong with him?” I only then realised he had been talking the entire time, cycling through the same few words like a soundboard. “Dude, man, bro, guy… guy!!! Bro! Haha, duuuuuude… maaaan!!”

I looked back at him, eyes wide open. “Do you have a problem with me being trans or something? I mean, it’s like you’re doubling down on how many ‘man’ and ‘dude’ you want to say… You’re not the first one, you know.”

“Duuuuuude, no, haha, man, bro, that’s not it, sir…” His movements had become so robotic and repetitive, he looked like someone had edited him into a YouTube Poop video.

Naka jumped out of his seat. “What’s going on?”

“Oh, he’s just having a moral panic attack,” I said to reassure him and his teammate. “Some people are frightened by anything that transitions. Gender. CSS. Apparently basic thought.” I whipped out my smartphone. “Hold on, I got the fix.”

I typed as fast as I could on the tiny touch keyboard, hoping the code might knock Mark out of whatever cursed animation loop he had entered:

* {
    animation-play-state: paused;
}

“Maybe that’ll do it?” I hit “Run,” but Mark kept jittering between the same three poses, like a GIF exported by a troll with a grudge against browsers. “Nope! He needs the full accessibility override. How about…”

@media (prefers-reduced-motion: reduce) {
    *,
    *::before,
    *::after {
        animation: none !important;
        scroll-behavior: auto !important;
        transition: none !important;
    }
}

I tapped “Run” again and watched our man-bro-dude-guy-sir slowly calm down before passing out in his seat.

Naka and Mike knelt down next to Mark, and the other people in the room all looked at me. I stared at the other participants at the meeting who never said a word. “Oh, thanks for the help, huh.” Turning back to Naka and Mike, I added, “He’ll be fine. He probably feels like he just ran a marathon now, so let him just rest. Just tell others the meeting room will be unavailable for a few hours.”

I looked at my watch then decided not to care about the time—I could make an early exit, so I did.

The meeting probably should have been an email.