A Project Falls Through

The call came at twenty past three on a Thursday in November, and it lasted twenty minutes. When it was over, Bogdan sat with his hand still on the phone for a while. Through the glass he could see the other four at their desks, working on something that had stopped existing at half past three.

The project had been running for eight months. It had been late twice, and both times they had brought it back. Nobody had told them that the budget on the client's side had been under review since the summer. The decision had been taken somewhere else, by people none of them had ever met.

Bogdan thought about waiting until Friday morning. He decided against it, because he knew that if he waited, somebody would hear it from a colleague in another office first, and then the whole thing would be about how badly it had been handled rather than about what had happened.

He called them into the small meeting room at four. He didn't sit down. He said the project had been cancelled, that it wasn't about their work, that everyone's job was safe, and that he had asked twice on the phone whether there was any way back. There wasn't.

Nobody said anything for about eight seconds, which is a very long time in a room with five people in it. Then Timo said, "Right," and folded his arms. Timo had said in March that the deadline was impossible, and he had been right, and now being right was worth nothing at all.

Nadja asked the practical question: what happens to the work? Bogdan said honestly that he didn't know yet. She nodded slowly. She had moved two hundred kilometres for this job in February, and everyone in the room knew it, and nobody said so.

Lena, who was the quietest of them, said that she felt relief, and then immediately apologised for it. Bogdan told her not to apologise. He had felt the same thing for about four seconds during the call, before the rest of it arrived, and he thought most people would have.

They went back to their desks and did nothing useful for an hour. Somebody put the kettle on. Emails were written and not sent. Jules opened the shared folder, looked at four hundred files, and closed it again without touching anything.

The whiteboard was the hardest part. It had been covered since March with their timeline, three columns of open questions and a drawing of a cat that nobody would admit to. On Friday afternoon Nadja stood in front of it with a cloth in her hand and didn't move for a minute.

"Photograph it first," Timo said from the doorway. So they did. They took eleven pictures, and then Nadja wiped the board in long strokes from the top, and the cat went last, and somebody in the corridor laughed at something completely unrelated.

The following week they were given other things to do, separately, and the team stopped being a team in the way that these things happen: not with an announcement, but because four people were now in four different meetings on Tuesday mornings.

Six weeks later Bogdan got an email he hadn't expected. A different client had a smaller problem which looked, from a distance, very much like the middle third of the cancelled project. Two of the files in that folder answered it almost completely. He forwarded the message to Nadja without writing anything.

She wrote back in four minutes: "I still have the photographs of the board." They didn't get the eight months back, and Bogdan never pretended that they had. But there is a cardboard box under his desk with a printed copy of that timeline in it, and he hasn't thrown it away.