Every second Tuesday I have a one hour break between work. In this time I like to occupy myself by sitting in the building and getting on with some bits and bobs here and there, the kind of work you don’t need to do immediately, but that it's nice to do when you get the chance. This time, every second Tuesday, was my chance to get on with these bits and bobs. So, every second Tuesday I’d sit myself down on the building’s first floor, in the same spot, and I’d get out my laptop. Usually by this point in the day my laptop would be pretty drained, so as you do I plugged it in, a ritual I became accustomed to as time went on. I’d reach around behind the sofa, plug in hand, and fiddle until it was in the socket. I needn’t flick the switch on, for it was already on from the last time I needed to charge. As I say, this became a ritual of mine, and I’m not good at having my rituals broken. I’d sit down, on the second Tuesday, the fourth Tuesday, the twenty sixth Tuesday of the year, and I’d plug my laptop in, not needing to switch the plug on. On one of these Tuesdays, exactly which now seems to evade me, I plugged in my laptop, and the signature beep-beep I had gotten used to, meaning it was charging, didn’t sound. Neither did the little battery icon show any signs that it was filling up. This break in routine alone was not enough to break my spirit however, it must simply have been that someone else had turned the plug off after they had charged their laptop. Perhaps a cleaner had come by and felt it necessary to switch the plug off. Who knows. For whatever reason it was off. So, I turned around, and lo’ and behold, I was right. I merely needed to switch the plug back on, and I could go about my business.
Before long this single break in routine spiraled out of control. It happened that on the next Tuesday that I came to sit in my usual spot, got out my laptop and plugged it in, the beep-beep I was expecting failed to sound once again. Peeved, but not all too dismayed, I reached around, and turned the switch back on. On the third occasion I began to lose my temper. “What the devil is going on?”, I thought to myself, how could this possibly keep happening? To be sure, someone was doing this, someone was turning the switch off in between my visits. But I never saw anyone else in the building around this time. I only came once every two weeks and so it was perfectly plausible that someone was coming along in the meantime, plugging in their computer, and turning it off each time. I suppose everyone had their preference, and everyone had a right to choose whether or not they would leave the switch on or off after using it. But equally what did it mean to this person? Couldn’t they see that I’d chosen to leave the switch on for next time I came to plug my computer in? Couldn’t they see that I also had a preference in the matter? Was my preference less important than theirs? Surely it only requires extra effort on both of our parts when done in such a way. They had to exert energy turning the switch off, and I had to exert energy turning it back on again. So it was sure to be a lose-lose situation. Something had to be done. My first thought was to put up a little sign next to the plug, reading something to the effect of: “LEAVE ON”. That would surely do the trick. So, I fashioned a little sign out of a scrap of paper and stuck it to the wall next to the plug. Then I got on with my work, before unplugging my laptop again and leaving for another two weeks.
When I returned to the building I was almost excited to see whether my sign had worked, whether I had managed to show this person who was boss, to exert something over them. I hadn’t. When I came to my seat, not only was the plug off, but my little paper sign had been removed. It was from this week onward that I struggled to keep my cool on the matter. This would only take up more and more of my precious hour set aside for the little bits and bobs of the week. How could I go on like this? Aside from turning the plug on, and writing up a new sign, reading: “THIS PLUG MUST NOT BE TURNED OFF”, I sat for a moment and wondered as to the person I could be dealing with. One thing was for certain, someone was behind this. Someone had to have turned the plug off, physically, with their finger. I began to wonder whether this could be some kind of act of malice, whether someone was doing this to spite me. I had no enemies I could think of, and I hadn’t really interacted with anyone in the building. So the odds that someone was out to get me really hadn’t seemed so high at first. But this just kept happening, so naturally I felt targeted, as though I was the victim of some crime. For all I knew, someone was coming here before my regular appointed time and was turning this plug off, before sneaking out of the building and disappearing from sight. No it couldn’t be a coincidence. This was a much more likely theory. There was one single malicious person who was doing this to me. I didn’t know who, why or when, but there certainly was one person who was tormenting me. I came to regard this person with hostility. When I walked down the street I began to scrutinise my passers-by. Most of them were insignificant. They didn’t hold themselves in any particular way, nor did they display any mood of note, nothing suspicious for me to pick up on, but sometimes I could feel their eyes boring into mine, as though they were interrogating me, and although I should have taken this as some kind of a sign, to pursue their hostility, it consistently made me pull up my collar around my neck and shy away from them. This person, although I had never met them, never encountered them, never even seen them, would not leave me alone. I could hardly sleep. They appeared in my dreams from one night to the next, taking on a kind of formless shape, like a kind of wind, a monotonous mixture of faces, an incomprehensible anger which blew alongside me as I walked down the road. In my dreams I could grasp this feeling, I could understand their anger and their hostility, but each time I awoke I was left with nothing but a sort of muggy, misty thought.
Every second Tuesday I would come back, sometimes even without the laptop, merely to check if the plug was off. I began scouring even the building for my enemy. There was never anyone else on any of the floors. The truth seemed simply to evade me. “There must be someone doing this to me,” I thought over and over again, “there must be someone doing this, someone had to physically turn the plug off it can’t be coincidence.” By now the wall around the socket was covered in scraps of paper, some of them shouting out from the plaster: “DON’T, DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT”, some were more pleading: “im begging you dont turn it off god please just leave the plug”. In some places the writing ran on to the wall, forming inky smudges in the plaster. The fiend wouldn’t get away with this, would they? Maybe they would, there was certainly nothing more I could do, nothing more than to come back to the building every two weeks and agonise over it for an hour at a time. But it killed me, God it killed me, to know that someone was doing this to hurt me. Someone hated me, and God that hurt. Someone made a conscious effort to ruin my day every time they turned that plug off. It began to take up a hell of a lot more of my time than just that hour. When I left the building I was thinking about the plug. It was impossible to sleep over those two weeks, knowing beyond reasonable doubt that at that very moment someone was in the building, smirking as they turned the plug off, knowing exactly what it would do to me, exactly how it would tear me up inside.
Nothing dissuaded me from going to the same spot every other week, I still go now. It’s been a long time since I’ve taken my laptop with me. I go there mainly just to check whether the plug is on or off. I turn it on, and then sit for an hour before leaving again. On reflection, I never thought to go at a different time, or to get there earlier or hang around later to try and catch the culprit. Nor did I think to go to a different building, or a different floor and plug my laptop in there either. Oh well, no sense in changing things up now I suppose.
