Ready in Four Minutes

It started with the rain. Not normal rain, the polite kind that taps on your window to say good morning. This was rain with a grudge. It came down sideways, then upwards, then from a direction I can only describe as “personally.” I stood at my front door with my umbrella and watched a pigeon walk past, soaked and furious. It did not fly. It had given up on flying. I respected that.

I opened the umbrella. The wind took one look at it and turned it inside out with the ease of someone flipping a pancake. I now held something that looked less like an umbrella and more like a metal flower in the middle of a breakdown.

“Fine,” I said to the sky. “Fine.”

The sky said nothing. It just rained harder, which I took as a reply.

By the time I reached the office, I was wet in places I didn’t know clothes could absorb water. My socks made a small squelch with every step, like two tiny frogs having a conversation. I walked past reception and Linda looked up from her desk.

“Raining?” she asked.

I looked at her. Water dripped from the end of my nose onto her keyboard.

“A bit,” I said.I sat down at my desk, pressed the power button on my computer, and waited. The screen lit up. A little spinning circle appeared. I watched it spin. It watched me back. We had a moment.

After four minutes, a message appeared:

Your system is updating. Do not turn off your computer. 3% complete.

Three percent. I had a meeting at nine. It was 8:52.

I looked around the office. Everyone else was also staring at their screens with the expression of people watching a slow horse in a race they had bet their house on. Tomas from accounting was gently tapping his monitor, the way you might pat a sick dog.

“Is yours updating too?” I asked.

“Mine updated,” he said quietly. “Then it un-updated. Now it’s asking me to choose a language.”

“Which language did you choose?”

“I don’t know. It’s not in any language I recognise. I think I may have chosen Finnish.”

At 9:10, the IT department sent an email to everyone saying that there was a small technical issue and we should not worry. Nobody could read the email, because nobody’s computer was working. We only knew about it because Linda printed it out on the one printer that still worked and walked around the office holding it up like a protest sign.

At 9:40, the system came back. Briefly. For about ninety seconds, everything worked perfectly and the whole office made a sound like a crowd at a football match when the home team scores. Then the screens went blue. All of them. At the same time. It was almost beautiful, like synchronised swimming, but for disasters.

My manager, Henrik, came out of his office and stood in the middle of the room.

“Okay, team,” he said. “Let’s use this time productively.”

We all waited to hear what productive thing we could do without computers, internet, phones that connected to the work system, or the coffee machine, which, it turned out, was also connected to the network and was now displaying the word ERROR in a font that seemed somehow judgmental.

Henrik thought about it for a long time.

“Let’s… tidy our desks,” he said.

So I tidied my desk. I found three pens that didn’t work, a receipt from 2023, a single paperclip shaped like a small question mark, and a sticky note that said DON’T FORGET without saying what I shouldn’t forget. I stared at it for some time. I still don’t know. I think about it sometimes at night.

Here’s the thing. I had one bright point in my day, one small sun behind all the clouds. My lunch.

The night before, I had been extremely organised. I’d gone to the supermarket and bought one of those ready-made meals, the nice kind, in a box with a picture of a happy chicken on the front. Chicken with rice and vegetables. “Ready in 4 minutes,” it said. I’d been thinking about it all morning. When the rain soaked me, I thought: at least there’s the chicken. When the computers died, I thought: the chicken will understand.

At 12:00 exactly, I took it to the office kitchen. The microwave, thank goodness, was not connected to the network. It was too old for that. It was the kind of microwave that had seen things. It had a dent in the door and a smell inside it that was a mix of fifteen years of everyone’s fish soup.

I pierced the film. I set it to four minutes. I stood there and watched my lunch spin around, glowing under the little light, like a small celebrity on a rotating stage.

Ding.

I took it to my freshly tidied desk. I peeled back the film. Steam rose up. Promising. I picked up my fork, took a big piece of chicken, put it in my mouth…

…and it was cold. Not just cold. Raw. The rice on the edges was lava hot, and the middle of the chicken was so uncooked it was practically still clucking. It was a meal of two climates. The outside was summer in Spain. The inside was February in the mountains.

I looked closer at the box. In tiny letters, under the happy chicken, it said: Cook in oven, 40 minutes. NOT SUITABLE FOR MICROWAVE.

And under that, smaller still: Ready in 4 minutes once cooked.

Once cooked. Ready in four minutes once cooked. Which is true of literally everything in the world. A cake is ready in zero minutes once baked. A house is ready to live in once built. I felt the happy chicken on the front of the box was laughing at me now. It was not a happy chicken. It was a smug chicken.

Tomas walked past, saw my face, saw the box, and quietly put half of his sandwich on my desk without a word. Then he walked away. There are good people in this world. Some of them have accidentally set their computer to Finnish, but they are good people.

At 4:30 Henrik told us we could go home, because, as he said, “There’s no point pretending anymore.” It was the most honest thing I’d ever heard a manager say.

The rain had calmed down to only medium-terrible. I walked to the bus stop with my broken umbrella, which I was now carrying mostly for emotional reasons. There were six other people waiting. We nodded at each other. The little digital sign said my bus would come in 4 minutes.

I had learned something today about the phrase “4 minutes,” and I didn’t trust it.

I was right not to.

After 4 minutes, the sign said 6 minutes. After 6 minutes, it said 2 minutes. After 2 minutes, it said 11 minutes. Then it said Delayed. Then, slowly, as if it felt embarrassed, it just went blank. A bus sign with nothing to say. I understood how it felt. I hadn’t had anything to say since lunch.

A woman with a big shopping bag sighed. A man in a suit checked his phone and said, “It says the bus has arrived.” We all looked at the empty street. We looked at each other. Somewhere, in another dimension, our bus was waiting at this stop, and in that dimension we were all happily sitting on it, warm and dry, eating chicken that had been cooked.

“I’m walking,” I announced, to no one, like a person in a war film volunteering for a dangerous mission.

Nobody stopped me.

It was a long walk. Normally the bus takes twenty minutes. On foot, it took an hour and a half, partly because of the distance, and partly because I took a wrong turn near the park and had to come back past the same bakery twice. The woman inside the bakery waved at me the second time. I waved back. We had become friends without ever speaking. It was the most stable relationship in my day.

My socks, which had dried a little bit during the afternoon, returned to their frog conversation. Squelch. Squelch. I tried to walk in rhythm with them. It helped, a little. I started to imagine I was in a musical. The Ballad of the Wet Socks. I hummed it quietly. A dog looked at me suspiciously. Its owner pulled it closer.

Halfway home, a car drove through a puddle right next to me. Of course it did. I didn’t even get angry. At this point it felt traditional, like the final firework at a festival. The water hit me, I accepted it, and I kept walking. I’m fairly sure I heard the smug chicken laughing somewhere in the distance.

Then, ten minutes from home, the rain stopped. Just like that. The clouds moved apart, and there was a thin orange line of sunset on the horizon. Everything shone: the wet streets, the rooftops, the puddles that had attacked me. A bird started singing. It was, honestly, beautiful.

And at exactly that moment, my bus drove past me.

It was completely empty. The driver was relaxed, maybe even smiling. The sign on the front of the bus, glowing brightly, said:

Have a nice day!

When I finally got home, I took off my shoes and my wet socks and put them on the radiator, where they sat looking sorry for themselves. I made toast. Just toast. Toast is honest. Toast does not lie to you about cooking times. You put it in, it becomes toast, and it pops up to tell you about it. Toast has never let me down.

I sat on the sofa with my toast and a cup of tea and thought about my day. The rain. The blue screens. The Finnish computer. The chicken. The invisible bus. The bakery woman. The sunset.

My phone buzzed. An email from IT, now that the system was back:

Dear all, we apologise for today’s disruption. The issue was caused by an unexpected update. We expect tomorrow to be completely normal.

I looked at the word tomorrow for a long time.

Then I went to the kitchen, took the rest of the smug chicken out of the fridge, and put it in the oven. Forty minutes.

I’m not stupid. I learn.

Tomorrow, at least, lunch will be ready in four minutes.