A screen going out, caught at the moment the picture has collapsed into a line.
Old monitors did this and the new ones do not, and I am aware that painting it dates the building and I do not mind. When you cut the power to a tube, the image falls in on itself from the top and the bottom at once, meets in the middle, and holds there for a fraction of a second as a thin bright horizontal line before it goes. Then a small green afterglow at the centre. Then nothing.
That was the sound and sight of the end of every shift. They powered the floor down by rows, back to front, and you would hear the click and then see the row behind you go, and then the next, and then yours.
I have spent a lot of time trying to work out why a mechanical artefact of a display technology should be moving, and I have an answer I am not entirely happy with.
It is because it looks like a decision. The image does not fade. It contracts, deliberately, to a line, and then holds, and then releases. There is a shape to it. It has the timing of something being closed rather than something running out, and the eye reads intent into it whether or not any is there.
We do not get many of those. Most things in a building like this stop without any form at all. The fluorescents drop instantly. The phones go dark between one instant and the next. This one object, on its way out, performs.
I have painted the line at full strength across the black glass, and I have kept the green in it, which is a colour I almost never use and had to go and buy. Either side of the monitor the cubicle partitions come in at an angle and there are headsets hanging on them, dark, unlit, the same ones from two panels back. The keyboard is at the bottom of the frame in shadow.
The whole picture is lit by the line. That is the joke, if there is one, and I did not construct it. The last thing that screen did was throw enough light to see the desk by.