Likely Normal

There’s a special kind of despair that sets in when you open your team’s sprint board and realize it’s less a plan of action and more a digital graveyard of abandoned hopes. Every ticket is a sea of red “BLOCKED” labels, each with the same haunting dependency: “Dave (PTO since 2019).” You half-expect Dave to be listed as a stakeholder on the project charter for Atlantis.

The stand-up meeting is a masterclass in creative excuses:

• “Yeah, so, still waiting on Dave for that API key…”
• “Dave’s the only one with access to the legacy system, and he’s… uh… still ‘out.’”
• “Has anyone checked if Dave is alive?”

The Scrum Master, a veteran of 1,000 failed retrospectives, nods solemnly and suggests “Let’s circle back to never,” which everyone immediately accepts as the only reasonable action item. Meanwhile, the Product Owner—who has never actually met Dave but has built an entire roadmap around his theoretical return—cheerfully adds “Just unblock yourselves!” as if the team hasn’t spent the last three years trying to exorcise Dave’s ghost from the codebase.

The real kicker? No one knows who Dave is anymore. He could be a former employee, a contractor who left mid-sentence in 2018, or possibly just a shared hallucination caused by too many sprint planning sessions. Yet his legacy lives on, a bureaucratic specter haunting every Jira ticket with the unshakable label: “Waiting on Dave.”