There is reason that most construction in office buildings is done at night, when office workers are not around. It has nothing to do with noise or cleanliness. It has to do with doorways to meeting rooms.

In the doorways of most company meeting rooms are coils of copper wire, wrapped in wool yarn, installed via a simple ritual involving a small amount of blood and dried avian bones. Workers walk through these coils as they pass into the meeting room. As they walk through the doorway, the coils absorb a small amount of their lifeforce, their third eye chakra to be exact.

Early attempts at energy collection were met with large scale side effects due to over harvesting, resulting in a depleted and uncreative workforce. This side effect, first seen in the Great Depression of the United States, were only resolved by the use of far stronger magic in World War II by the Allied and Axis powers. Modern collection techniques are subtle enough to allow sufficient individual restoration of energy over time, but with frequently harvested meeting goers, the effect on health and thought can be debilitating.

Modern chakra lifeforce removal systems route collected energy to the nearest living entity, most commonly a plant where it is stored for removal later. There is no sane reason that plants should be living in office buildings, yet they are found on every floor of every building. Gardeners visit the plants weekly and appear to be dusting off the leaves. In actuality the beeswax coated dusting cloths remove the energy from the plants, and the used cloths deposited into metal cans with concealed Leyden Jars as collection points.

The purpose of all this lifeforce energy collection is enable the performance of the Scalzi-Hunter Ritual of Success, first developed by Professors Scalzi and Hunter of Miskatonic University in 1925. Rite requires huge amounts energy to perform correctly, but does allow for the somewhat accurate prediction of the answer to a specific question spoken aloud at the height of the Ritual.

Corporate performers of the Scalzi-Hunter Ritual of Success typically ask specific questions about the marketplace or products. There is some risk involved, as that the Rite has been empirically found to give the correct answer only ~90% of the time. For many purposes this is an acceptable risk, but in obvious cases such as the Edsel, New Coke, and the Second Gulf War, the failures are spectacular in nature.

The only known countermeasure to the collection system is known as the Sculpin Defense in which a knowing person can take advantage of the direct sunlight to replenish their energy reserves directly. To avoid this possibility, many meeting rooms are designed without windows or with blinds to limit the amount of natural light entering the room.