The room is ready before anyone needs it.
This is the second floor of a municipal building at ten minutes to nine, and the only thing lit is a yellow plastic box screwed to the wall at the height of an average chest. One fluorescent tube above it. The clock is on the left in almost total shadow and you can find it if you look, which is how I painted it, because that is how it is in the room.
Look at the dispenser. There is already a small tongue of paper hanging out of the slot. It has been hanging there all night. The machine did not wait until someone arrived to make its offer; the offer was extended into an empty room at three in the morning and stayed extended, and will be there tomorrow, and this is the condition I wanted the first panel of the series to be in.
The chairs are along the bottom edge in the dark and I have deliberately not given them much. They come later.
I have spent a fair amount of my life in rooms that were prepared for me in advance by people I never met. Somebody bolted that box to that wall. Somebody chose the height. Somebody decided the paper should protrude slightly rather than sit flush, because a flush slot does not read as an invitation and a protruding tab does, and that person understood something about human beings that most painters take a career to learn.
The title is the plain fact of the picture. Nothing here has a name yet. Nobody has been sorted. The room is at its most generous in the eleven hours a day when it is empty, and I wanted to paint it in that condition once, honestly, before the rest of the series takes it apart.