The excruciating quest for a meeting room

WHAT is the scarcest resource in business? Good people? Patient capital? Uncontested markets? The correct answer is meeting rooms. (Or, more accurately, meeting rooms when you actually want to have a meeting; when you have no need for one, they are always completely empty.)

When rooms are in demand, the top of every hour ushers in the same scene. First, lots of people rise from their desks and start to walk around with water bottles. The risk of dehydration is not high if you are sitting in a conference room for an hour. But you never know.

Someone asks a colleague which meeting room has been booked, a reminder that rooms should not be given names. “Are we indecisive?” “What?” “Are we in Decisive?” “Oh. No. We’re incapable.” “What?” And so on, until someone reverts to normal speech: “It’s the big one by the lift.”