...
[12:06:10 CST(-0600)] <EricDalquist> you did some work, did a local commit, didn't push. then I did a bunch of commits and pushed them, next time you did a pull the merge commit was needed
[12:06:30 CST(-0600)] <EricDalquist> or same idea but you didn't do your pull before you did your local commit
[12:06:34 CST(-0600)] <EricDalquist> which resulted in the merge
[12:07:00 CST(-0600)] <EricDalquist> either way, we both did work and committed with commit X as a parent
[12:07:15 CST(-0600)] <EricDalquist> and the result is that one of us (whoever did their work 2nd) would have to do a merge commit