Option Six

When a group of overpaid adults spend 45 minutes white-boarding five increasingly unhinged solutions to a simple problem — complete with microservices, event queues, and at least one person drawing arrows that connect to nothing — and then someone joins the call late, skims the last 30 seconds of chat, and goes "wait, why don't we just…"

That's Option 6. It wasn't on the board. It required no suffering to discover. It works.

Usage notes:

Always delivered by someone who missed the entire descent into madness
Causes instant relief and a faint, inexplicable shame
Meeting ends within 4 minutes of Option 6 being named
The person who suggested Options 1–5 will not make eye contact

43 minutes of architecture
"Okay so Option 3 needs a new Lambda, Option 4 requires buy-in from Platform, and Option 5 might violate GDPR—"
someone joins
"Hey sorry, back-to-back meetings. What are we solving?"
30 second summary later
"Oh. what about option six - just change the config?"
silence

by aerialdracula March 19, 2026