NO SIGNAL

The projector died forty seconds into Marcus's pitch. Not dramatically. It just went from showing his opening slide, a very expensive photograph of a warehouse, to showing nothing, and then to showing the little blue rectangle that said NO SIGNAL in a font he would remember for the rest of his life. There were a hundred and twenty people in the room. Four of them mattered. He knew exactly where they were sitting because he'd checked the seating plan the night before like a man checking exits. "Well," he said. Somebody laughed. Not unkindly. The event organiser was already moving down the side aisle in a crouch, the universal posture of a person who is about to touch a cable and hope. Marcus had five minutes. He had, by his count, four minutes and ten seconds. He'd rehearsed the deck for three weeks. He knew every transition. He knew the exact moment the revenue graph animated in. None of that was going to happen. "OK," he said, and stepped in front of the lectern, out of the dead projector's light. "Let me just tell you." And he did. He told them about the warehouse manager in Leeds who'd shown him a clipboard with two hundred handwritten rows and said this is the system, mate. He told them that they'd signed that manager's company as their first customer and that eleven months later she'd rung him personally to say the clipboard was in a drawer and she'd forgotten it was there. He told them the number of customers, the revenue, the burn, from memory, because those numbers were in his head the way his children's birthdays were. He didn't get to the competitor slide. He didn't get to the team slide, which was a shame because his co-founder had spent a week getting a good photo. The organiser got the projector working with ninety seconds to go and he waved at her to leave it off. Afterwards a woman he didn't recognise found him by the coffee. "That was the only pitch I remember," she said. "Because of the projector." "Because you knew your numbers without slides. Most people up there don't." She handed him a card. It was one of the four. He found out later that the projector had been unplugged by the previous presenter's laptop bag. He sent her a bottle of wine.