The notification sound cut through my peaceful Sunday afternoon like a siren. I looked at my phone and froze. It was an email from the CEO. Subject line: URGENT: ALL HANDS MEETING NOW.
My stomach dropped. In the corporate world, “emergency meetings” on weekends only mean one thing: the ship is sinking.
I scrambled to my laptop, throwing a blazer over my pajamas. I logged into Zoom, my heart pounding in my ears. The gallery view was a mosaic of terrified faces—colleagues in hoodies, colleagues with wet hair, all of us looking like we were waiting for the executioner.
My boss called an emergency Zoom meeting on a Sunday.
He appeared on the screen. He wasn’t smiling. He looked haggard, serious, and deeply troubled.
“Thank you for joining on such short notice,” he began, his voice low. “‘We have a crisis.’“.
A collective gasp went through the virtual room. This was it. The merger. The lawsuit. The end.
“‘I need everyone’s input,’” he continued, looking grave.
We all braced for layoffs. I was already mentally updating my resume and calculating how long I could live on ramen noodles.
“I’m going to share my screen now,” he said.
I squinted, preparing to see a red-inked budget report or a legal cease-and-desist letter.
The screen flickered. An image appeared.
It wasn’t a spreadsheet. It was a picture of him holding two ties. One was a navy stripe; the other was a bold crimson.
The silence on the call was deafening.
“‘Blue or Red for my anniversary dinner tonight?’” he asked, his voice trembling slightly.
I blinked. I looked at my coworkers’ squares. Everyone was frozen in a state of confusion.
“Sir?” someone ventured. “Is this… the crisis?”
“Yes!” he snapped. “‘My wife is scary when I clash.’“.
The tension in the room snapped like a rubber band. We hadn’t been gathered to save the company; we had been gathered to save his marriage. We spent the next fifteen minutes debating patterns and textures with the intensity of a UN summit, knowing that while our jobs were safe, our boss’s life apparently hung by a silk thread.
