Thursday night

Exhaustion and heat osmose in, lazily, through the floor-height glass-paned windows.
Today the air conditioner is off, and I am stuck at 7 pm
to the fabric of my black desk chair
by an upcoming conference call with India - twelve and one half
hours ahead of me around the world.

The air conditioner is off. We turn the thermostat down
and email Facilities (who we suspect go home at 5 pm, day in and out,
their lives untroubled by product launches - but perhaps
there are other consolations, new cafes and traffic flow to solve).
There is no answer.

We eat take-out Thai food from recyclable corn-based cardboard boxes
in the coolest conference room we can find.
(It's on Facilities' side of the building. Go figure.)
The room smells of hot grease and dry-erase marker; the early evening sun
glares on the projector screen but we, rebellious, refuse to close the blinds.

The phone rings: India, and a dual-continented policy discussion
taking place simultaneously at night and morning.
Can we ever really agree? We all knew each other in the same context
before the India office opened. "It's hot here," we in California say,
but we know, this time of year, it's really hotter in Hyderabad.