The Meeting Room
One room. Twelve chairs. Power decided not by words, but by angles, posture, and movements too small to admit.
The company had one conference room, twelve seats. Twelve levels of power.
At first, it was just timing — people drifting in a few minutes early to claim the stronger spots. But the room calcified into a battlefield of quiet moves, where every gesture meant something. The head of the table was obvious, but the diagonals became the real prize: seats that offered clean sightlines without confrontation. Whoever sat there could control the room with nothing more than a nod.
Tactics evolved. A laptop screen tilted a fraction of a degree, supposedly to block glare, but in reality forcing the conversation to bend around its owner. A chair nudged a few millimeters forward, enough to intrude on another’s space without ever being acknowledged. Even the angle of a pen mattered: perfectly parallel to the table edge projected order; deliberately skewed suggested casual dominance.
When the engineers joined the game, things grew stranger. They began staying late “to prep slides,” but were in fact running digital models of the conference room. CAD drawings circulated quietly, simulating lines of sight and dominance zones. Someone even ran finite element analysis on the table itself, mapping how its curvature shifted attention. Copies of stress plots were later discovered in the shred bin, shredded diagonally for emphasis.
The first time calipers appeared was mid-meeting. An analyst, having just been spoken over, slipped his hand under the table and began measuring the gap between chair legs and the wall. Hidden from sight, he adjusted his position by less than half a millimeter. It was enough: the eye-line shifted, and the conversation began flowing toward him instead.
Feet were another front. Angles mattered. Too open, aggressive. Too closed, submissive. One man returned from a weekend “injury” with his ankle locked in a brace. The story was soccer. Everyone knew it was geometry. His foot now rested in the perfect neutral position, pointing at no one, betraying nothing.
Others relied on pure posture. A manager once sat perfectly still, hands hovering millimeters above the table, adopting a pose so unreadable it terrified everyone. People began calling it the void.
By then the rituals were entrenched. Jackets draped over chairs hours before meetings, claiming space like banners on a battlefield. Whiteboards filled with elaborate diagrams, only to be erased moments before others arrived, proof that unseen calculations had already been made. A VP who started bringing two coffees, one untouched, never explained it. He didn’t have to.
By the time meetings began, the business on the agenda was irrelevant. The true decisions had already been made in silence, in posture, in micrometers.
The CEO eventually banned all meetings.
It didn’t matter. The room stayed full every morning.