Likely Normal

There’s no battlefield more chaotic than a shared Google Doc. What begins as a harmless collaboration—“Let’s all work together on this!”—quickly devolves into a passive-aggressive war of fonts, comments, and rogue cursor movements. Suddenly, you’re not just editing a document; you’re engaged in a high-stakes power struggle where the only rule is there are no rules.

At first, it’s civil. Someone makes a polite suggestion in the comments: “Maybe we should rephrase this sentence?” Then, like a diplomatic negotiation gone wrong, the responses escalate: “OR maybe we should delete this entire section because it’s terrible?” Before you know it, the doc becomes a gladiator arena where people start rewriting each other’s paragraphs in real time, leading to a frantic tug-of-war where sentences appear, disappear, and reappear with entirely new meanings. “Did you just undo my edit to re-edit your own edit?” Yes. Yes, they did.

Then come the cursor standoffs—that awkward moment when two people are typing in the same spot at the same time, and neither will back down. It’s like a digital game of chicken, except instead of cars, it’s two grown adults silently seething as their cursors blink aggressively at each other. “Move. Your. Cursor.” “No, YOU move.” Meanwhile, a third collaborator watches in horror as the document autosaves this nonsense for eternity.

The real chaos begins when someone discovers Suggesting Mode, the nuclear option of Google Docs warfare. Suddenly, every change is a debate, and every deletion is a personal attack. “Who rejected my suggestion to add ‘synergistic’ to the mission statement? Coward.” People start leaving petty comments like “This font is Comic Sans energy” or “Citation needed (for your bad taste).” Before long, the doc is a wasteland of unresolved suggestions and sarcastic emoji reactions.

And let’s not forget the anonymous vandal—the person who covertly changes all instances of “teamwork” to “tyranny” and then acts innocent when someone notices. “Who wrote ‘This project is a sinking ship’ in the header?” “Not me,” says the person whose cursor was definitely just hovering over the text.

In the end, the document is saved (barely), but relationships are forever scarred. What started as a simple group project has turned into a psychological thriller where the real lesson is: Never trust anyone with edit access. Next time, maybe just pass around a notebook. At least then, the worst that can happen is someone tears out a page—instead of leaving a comment that simply reads “?”