A couple of colleagues and I are standing around, chatting absently, giggling about something. I’m just about to leave for the day so I happily yank my iPhone from its charging socket… Except, something goes wrong and I end up entangling my hand in the cord. The iPhone goes flying across the room – almost in slow motion as my eyes grow wider – and smashes itself spectacularly on the floor. I frantically retrieve it from the floor in the hope that the damage is not too bad. Not only are multiple windows dancing randomly on the cracked screen but my iTunes has also decided to turn itself on and belt out Jumma Chumma De De. Yes. It has clearly lost its mental balance (the phone, not me just yet). Okay, before you judge me – in my defence, that happens to be a 10-second segment on this one track called the Bachchan Mashup. ONE track. Out of some 4 gazillion. But of course that’s the one the by-now brain dead phone decides to voluntarily play when my colleagues are standing by witnessing the scene.

One colleague bursts out laughing even as I wail about my wrecked phone and says, “I’m afraid you’ll have to change that phone immediately, or it’ll start revealing all your secrets”.

Before I can recover from that mortification, the phone begins to ring. It is vibrating actually, because the ringer too, doesn’t seem to be working. As luck would have it, it is my boss. But much as I try and try again, I do not succeed. The screen, which looks like some sort of LSD induced hallucination, will not allow me to receive the goddamn call! I can’t swipe right. The hysterical laughter around me also stops abruptly as my colleagues see the name flashing on my poor smashed screen. Okay I need to call him back pronto. Somehow. There is this thing called the landline. I am about to leap at the nearest one, when another colleague comes rushing up to me and informs me that the boss wants me in the conference room immediately, for some meeting.

What?

What meeting? I don’t know about any meeting.

Something’s come up she says. I have to join this meeting. Now.
Okay.

So I rush to the conference room with her and barge in, waving my phone apologetically and saying “I just broke my phone, right now, when you were calling…” and while doing so, I stumble in, trip on  a chair, fall onto the conference table and knock off some big fancy veneer thing from one leg of the table. It falls to the ground with a great, massive thud. And there is pin drop silence in the room. I finally look up and register at least four entirely unknown faces in the meeting. I gulp.

“Tina, we were just talking about you,” says the boss slowly, through gritted teeth. “And how you are one of our most experienced people and would be ideal for this project.”

Said project is serious, sombre, sensitive.

Not clumsy, not daft. And certainly not lunatic.

The four strangers are staring at me peculiarly, as though observing a new exhibit at the zoo. Never mind what eventually happened at the meeting, I learnt something new today: that a day can go from happy humdrum to a tragic-comic in the space of five minutes. And now I finally know how Bridget Jones must have felt.

And yes, my phone is absolutely screwed.