I Knew the Office Before the Tour

First day at a new job, eighth floor of a building I had never been inside — I had interviewed by video, signed by email, and the office itself was a complete unknown to me in every ordinary sense of the word.

The HR coordinator collected me at the lift for the welcome tour, and the feeling arrived before we passed the first meeting room. Not the two-second shimmer everyone knows. A settled, factual familiarity, like returning after a holiday.

I decided to test it, quietly. As we walked I told myself what came next: kitchenette on the left, kettle with electrical tape around the handle. We turned, and there it was, taped exactly where my mind had put the tape. Around the next corner, I thought: printer alcove, and someone will have left a broken swivel chair beside it with a missing armrest. Printer alcove. Broken chair. No left armrest.

By then my scalp was crawling pleasantly, so I escalated: I said it out loud. 'Is there a poster of a lighthouse in the stairwell?' The coordinator blinked and said, 'Yes? The old team-building one. How do you—' I told her the truth and she laughed it off, but she took the longer route after that, and I knew that route too.

Fourteen predictions, silent and spoken, over one tour. Fourteen correct. The fifteenth — I expected a fish tank in the break room — was wrong, and I was almost relieved to have missed one. Then a colleague mentioned at lunch that the tank had been removed the month before because of a leak. Its outline was still on the shelf paint, a pale rectangle with rounded corners.

I have worked there three years now and the feeling has never returned. Whatever file my head was reading from that morning, it covered the premises as of roughly a month before I arrived, and then it closed.