The Client came to us in early June of 2026 in a state the Journal can best describe as chronically late by association. Her grievance concerned a pattern of departure delay on the part of the Respondent — observed across the past year, refined over time, and now operating, in the Client's assessment, at a level of doctrinal sophistication that exceeded her capacity to counter. The pattern was as follows.
On any occasion involving a household departure, the Client would issue, at a calibrated interval before the departure was required, a verbal call for the Respondent to come downstairs. The Respondent would respond, from a position on the upper floor, with a single phrase indicating she was almost ready. The phrase had evolved over time; the Client could recite its principal versions in chronological order, though only one was now in active use. In her earliest years, the Respondent had said "almost done"; this had given way, in middle childhood, to "five more minutes"; in early adolescence to "two seconds"; and in the present period, to a phrase the Respondent now exclusively employed, regardless of remaining task: "I'm locked in." The phrase, the Client noted, signified neither time elapsed nor task in progress. It signified, in effect, only that the question had been heard.
Over a single evening preceding the consultation, the Client had — by her own count, kept on a small notepad in her car — issued seven distinct departure prompts. The Respondent had replied to each with "I'm locked in." Cumulative elapsed time between the first prompt and the Respondent's actual descent of the stairs: ninety-three minutes. The destination, the Client added, had been a routine dinner with extended family, of moderate but not unlimited tolerance for delay.
The Respondent's Theory
The Respondent, when consulted, did not dispute the count. She advanced, instead, a methodological critique. The phrase "I'm locked in," she said, did not constitute a representation about time. It was a statement of internal cognitive state. To be locked in was to be focused, in the moment, on a task; it implied nothing about the duration of the task or its proximity to completion. The Client's interpretation of the phrase as meaning "almost done" was, she said, an unwarranted parental gloss.
The Respondent further argued that the original prompt had not, in any of its seven utterances, specified the actual departure time. The Client had merely said "we need to go." This formulation, in the Respondent's reading, was insufficiently precise; need, she observed, is a continuous predicate, and the question of when the need ripened into an immediate operational constraint was, on her account, not specified. Had the Client said "I am driving away in three minutes whether you are in the car or not," the Respondent would, she said, have responded with corresponding precision.
The Journal's Assessment
We have seen this case before. We have, in fact, seen it in every household with a teenager and a doorway, in every era of recorded household law, in language that varies but in structure does not. The case is foundational. It does not get easier.
The doctrinal question is whether the Respondent's series of indefinite responses, each of which on its face represented that compliance was imminent, can be aggregated to support a finding that the Respondent had effectively repudiated the departure. We hold that it can. The doctrine we propose is dilatory temporal inflation — the principle that a unit of time, when repeatedly invoked in support of delayed performance, becomes, over the course of the delay, increasingly inflated, until it ceases to carry any operational meaning at all and serves only as a placeholder confirming that the question has been heard.
The phenomenon is not specific to the phrase. It applies equally to "five more minutes," "two seconds," "I'm coming," "be right there," and all subsequent generations of the form. The phrases vary by era; the inflation is constant.
The seventh "I'm locked in" of the evening does not mean five minutes. It does not mean any number of minutes. It means: I have heard you, and I have produced the appropriate sound.
Disposition
The matter resolved through a calibration of the Client's own protocol. She now issues, at the moment of intended departure, a single statement of operational fact: "I am leaving in eleven minutes." The unit of eleven minutes has, by virtue of its specificity, proven harder to inflate. Compliance, the Client reports, has improved to the point of approximately seventy-five percent. The Respondent, when asked about the new protocol, conceded that it was "actually helpful," in a tone the Client described as faintly disappointed. The Journal regards this as the optimum achievable outcome.