THE TENTH FLOOR

OVERVIEW

SW8's premises occupy a four-storey building plus a basement. This is confirmed by the lease, the building survey, the fire safety assessment, the council planning record, and the unanimous testimony of everyone who has ever looked at it from outside. The building has four floors. The Tenth Floor is one of them.

The Tenth Floor was first formally described in the Founder's Event I diagram. It has since been independently confirmed by: post addressed to it and successfully delivered; an internal phone extension (1010) that rings and is answered; a recurring £0.00 line on the cleaning contractor's invoice annotated "10F — as agreed"; and one team member who took the lift, pressed an unlabelled button below the alarm, and spent what they described as "a really productive afternoon" somewhere with "much better light than we have downstairs." They returned with a finished deck nobody had briefed. The deck was excellent. They cannot find the button again. They have stopped looking. They seem happier.

It should be stressed that the Tenth Floor is the building's pleasant impossibility. The lift's unlabelled buttons run in both directions, and pressing one below the basement does not lead anywhere productive. For the building's downward anomaly — which is also an ordinary-looking office, and from which almost no one comes back — see Floor B-13. The two are believed to be related the way an exhale and a held breath are related. Staff are encouraged to use the former and to never, alone, use the latter. For what happens when the lift is given a button it did not previously have, see the 216th Floor — the only such floor we asked for on purpose.

EVIDENCE OF OCCUPATION

• Extension 1010 is answered, on average, by the third ring, by a voice that is professional, helpful, and slightly too pleased to hear from you. It refers to itself in the first person plural. It has never given a name. It has resolved four IT tickets that were never raised.
• The Tenth Floor submits a weekly status update to the shared drive. The updates are well-written. They report progress on projects the rest of the company has not started. When the company later starts those projects, the work is already done and is attributed in version control to a committer named 10F.
• Catering for "the tenth floor team" is ordered automatically every Friday. It is collected. The collection is on CCTV. The CCTV shows the food leaving reception. It does not show who collects it. The lift is not called. The stairwell door does not open. The food is gone.
• The building has nine floors fewer than the Tenth Floor's existence requires. This shortfall has been raised with facilities. Facilities have logged it under "snagging." It remains open. It is the oldest open ticket in the system. It will not be the last to be closed.

CURRENT POSITION

The company's position, agreed at board level, is that the Tenth Floor is a high-performing, fully remote, slightly inaccessible team that consistently delivers ahead of schedule and never raises grievances, and that on balance there is no business case for investigating it further. Wellbeing has noted that this is "the healthiest relationship the company has with any of its anomalies." The Tenth Floor has been left to its work. Its work continues. Its light, by every account, is wonderful.