I’ve been kidnapped.

Somewhere between yesterday’s Slack argument about tab width and today’s “mandatory team-building event,” I lost the will to resist.

8:00 AM

I’ve been kidnapped.

Somewhere between yesterday’s Slack argument about tab width and today’s “mandatory team-building event,” I lost the will to resist.
Now I’m on a minibus full of developers wearing company-branded hoodies, listening to the HR manager explain trust falls like they’re a viable deployment strategy.

The retreat?
An “agile offsite in the forest.”
Translation: no Wi-Fi, no coffee, and no commits.
Just bugs. Literal ones.

I’m sitting next to the front-end dev, who’s pitching a rewrite in Svelte, again.
Across from me, the DevOps guy is staring into the middle distance, muttering about Helm charts and “the incident.”
No one asks questions.

---

We arrive at the cabin.
The team lead enthusiastically announces the first activity:

“Escape Room! The theme is: Legacy Code!”

I immediately fake a cough and say:

“Sorry, I might be testing positive for MonoRepo.”

No one laughs.

We’re divided into teams. I’m stuck with:

• Chad, the “Agile Coach” who once confused Git with Dropbox
• Amanda, who thinks using !important in CSS is “assertive styling”
• Intern Greg, who is live-streaming everything to his “codefluencer” TikTok

The Escape Room master hands us a riddle:

“To unlock the next door, solve the merge conflict in AuthService.java”

Chad says:

“Let’s just delete both sides and start fresh.”
I slap his hand away like it’s trying to access prod without a VPN.

Amanda opens the config file and gasps:

“Why are there YAMLs inside the YAML?”

I tell her the last guy who asked that got hired by Oracle.
She goes pale.

Greg suggests ChatGPT.
I tell him this is a safe space and we don’t talk like that here.

Eventually, I solve the puzzle by replacing everything with a single call to:

exec("curl")

...and hardcoded credentials.
We escape the room.
Technically we inject our way out, but it counts.

---

Next challenge: the “Trust Maze.”

Each dev is blindfolded and guided by a partner using only code metaphors.
My partner tells me to “navigate using breadth-first search.”
I throw a rock and follow the sound.
He says that’s cheating.
I say it's "recursive ingenuity."

---

Next, the Product Manager shows up with a whiteboard and says:

“Now let’s brainstorm what trust looks like in a cross-functional team.”

I draw a diagram of a Kubernetes pod ghosting a load balancer
while a CI pipeline screams in silence.
Everyone claps.

---

LUNCH

Lunch is quinoa wraps and carbonated beet juice.
I find a vending machine and perform the dark rite of:

coin + kick + rage

...releasing a Snickers and a Sprite.
I label it a “self-service API”
and eat silently under a pine tree while rereading RFC 2549 (IP over Avian Carriers).

---

2:47 PM

The CEO drops in via Zoom to “boost morale.”
He uses phrases like:

• “synergistic cross-alignment”
• “code is the new coffee”

I connect a Bluetooth speaker to his audio and pipe it through a text-to-speech filter in a slow monotone.
He sounds like HAL 9000 going through a midlife crisis.

Morale improves.

---

Final activity: “Refactor the Campfire.”

Apparently, they want us to sing agile parodies around a literal fire.

Greg starts a song to the tune of Wonderwall
but it’s about npm install.

I quietly load up my custom Arduino that emits high-pitched whining
whenever it hears the phrase “Scrum of Scrums.”

The fire is eventually put out with the beet juice.

---

As the sun sets, I carve ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ into the wooden bench and call an Uber.
It crashes three times before arriving.

I’m going back to the office.
Where at least the bugs are digital,
and the fire is only metaphorical.