The Power Cut

At 3:17 on a gray Thursday afternoon, the twelfth floor of Calder House went dark. The screens died, the air conditioning sighed to a halt and, somewhere near the kitchen, the coffee machine gave a strangled gurgle and fell silent. For a moment, nobody in the marketing department of a mid-sized Glasgow insurance company said anything at all.

"Is it just us?" asked Fiona, from somewhere behind a filing cabinet. Kenny went to the window. "Whole street, by the look of it. Traffic lights and all." Priya tried the lift. "Not working." "Stairs, then?" "Twelve floors? In these shoes? Not a chance." A message from building security reached them a few minutes later: stay where you are, the problem was being looked into, power should be back within the hour. Possibly two.

Their laptops lasted longer than their patience. By four o'clock, with the batteries running low and the Wi-Fi long gone, the six of them had drifted, without anyone suggesting it, to the big table in the meeting room, the one with the window. The light was fading. Someone had found a packet of biscuits. It was, Kenny remarked, the first meeting in that room he had ever actually enjoyed.

That was where it started. "Can I say something?" said Fiona. "The Monday meeting. Does anyone actually find it useful?" There was a pause, the kind that usually ends with everyone looking at their notes. Then Graham, who had worked there for nineteen years and was generally assumed to love the Monday meeting, said, "No. Never have." "Me neither." "Nor me." "I thought it was just me." "So did I."

It was as though the darkness had switched off something else as well: the careful, cheerful, slightly empty tone they all used in emails. Priya admitted she had applied for a job elsewhere and then withdrawn, because she liked the people, if not the work. Kenny confessed that the quarterly report everyone praised was mostly written by an intern who had since left. Graham said he had been meaning to retire for three years and kept putting it off because he did not know what he would do with his Mondays.

"Free," said Fiona. "You'd have them free." Everyone laughed, Graham loudest of all. Their manager, Alison, had said almost nothing until then. She sat at the end of the table with her arms folded, and Kenny, who had made the comment about the intern, was starting to wonder whether he would regret it. When she finally spoke, it was quietly. "I hate the Monday meeting too," she said. "I only keep it because I thought you all expected it."

Nobody quite knew what to say to that, so for a while nobody said anything. Outside, the streetlights were still off and the city looked unfamiliar, almost rural, the hills beyond the river suddenly visible against the last of the sky. Somebody divided the final biscuit into six pieces with a ruler. Later, nobody could remember who.

At 5:42 the lights came back on with a hum and a flicker. The screens woke up, the coffee machine coughed and resumed its gurgling, and the six of them blinked at each other across the table like people caught in the middle of something faintly embarrassing. Within minutes they were back at their desks, typing. Nobody mentioned the conversation. It was as if the whole afternoon had been agreed to be off the record.

On Monday morning, however, the meeting room was empty at nine o'clock. In everyone's inbox was a short email from Alison. "Monday meeting canceled," it said. "Permanently. If anyone needs me, I'll be in the room with the window. Bring biscuits."