The Gremlin at Standup

Slow erosion. Subtle survival. Silent defiance.

The first time it happened, nobody said anything—not really. Nobody ever does, not at first. It passed like a breeze through a tired room. A flicker. A moment. And yet, that’s how it begins.

Tamsin was speaking—offering her update, carefully, slowly, the way people do when they’ve taught themselves to carry weight gently—when Jerrick, tall and cocksure with that gleam behind the eyes that so often passes for intelligence, chuckled and cut across her words. “You always say ‘just real quick,’ but it never is.”

There was laughter. Not the kind that lifts a room. Not the kind that shares in joy. It was the other kind—the kind that leaves you cold after. The kind that says, I saw what happened and I’m not going to say a thing.

Tamsin smiled, or rather, performed a smile. She said “Fair,” but her voice didn’t rise the way it usually did. Her body knew what had happened even if her mouth refused to name it. And when she lowered her eyes, it was not to concede, but to protect what was left of herself.

By Friday, she spoke in lists. By the end of the month, she had learned the gift of invisibility. She only spoke when her name was pulled from silence like a string through fabric.

Let me tell you something about Gremlins, these little gods of the workplace, half-made of shadow and the fear of speaking out. They don’t come with fire. They don’t need to. They come in with routine. They arrive in laughter, in the shrug of a shoulder, in a silence passed from one face to another. They do not need to be cruel to be corrosive.

Jerrick was not a villain—not in the operatic way we are taught to recognize one. He was helpful, when it suited him. He was clever, loud, and terribly efficient at sounding right. But he had no need for curiosity. He didn’t ask questions. He asked for compliance. And the system backed him, as systems do: slowly, invisibly, like old hands slipping into well-worn gloves.

He had survived three reorgs. A VP turnover. Two platform migrations. People like him don’t rise—they remain. And the team, like water over stone, began to shape itself around him.

Ramona, the product manager, practiced her pitches alone in the mirror, searching for the version that wouldn’t be dismissed with, “We tried that three years ago.”

Jimmy, too new to know what kind of fear was settling into his bones, rewrote a Slack message four times just to sound like he knew what he was doing—even though he did.

Nobody ever said Jerrick was cruel. That’s how it works. He didn’t need to be. He was gravitational. The room bent toward him—not from love or loyalty, but because resistance is exhausting. And silence, if practiced long enough, begins to sound like harmony.

People adjusted. Voices got quieter. Jokes were shortened. Meetings ended faster.

You might ask, “But why didn’t anyone say anything?” And I would say: Because silence has a way of dressing itself up as peace. There’s a moment—every day, sometimes every hour—when someone sees it, hears it, feels it. And they want to speak. You see it in the flicker in their eyes, the way their breath catches.

“Hey, let her finish.”

But the moment passes. The calculation runs too fast. And so they look down. They nod. And it continues. Again.

This isn’t a story about one man. No. It’s a story about how people learn to bend. About how fear becomes a meeting norm. About how we turn adaptation into a policy and call it professionalism.

The team stopped making trouble. They stopped making waves. They rerouted ambition into side projects. They changed workflows not because it was better—but because it was easier.

And somewhere between one standup and the next, somewhere between one silence and the next, the room went quiet.

Too quiet.