I’m not proud of this morning’s HR meeting, but I know I can turn things around. The memory comes back to me as if it’s happening right now. Mrs. Martinez’s deep sigh as she adjusted her reading glasses, the incident report spread across her desk like evidence at a trial.
“Mr. Charles,” she’d said, using my name in a way that always makes me feel like I’ve been sent to the principal’soffice, “please explain how the coffee maker ended up…airborne.”
“Well,” I’d replied, leaning forward eagerly, “I was trying to increase efficiency by modifying the pressure valve. Did you know that most commercial coffee makers only operate at sixty percent of their potential capacity? I read this fascinating article about fluid dynamics and thought?—”
Her raised hand had cut off my explanation and my move to grab the design I drew in my sketchpad.
“The coffee maker exploded, Mr. Charles. It launched coffee grounds across three cubicles and into Mrs. Huang’s presentation materials for the board meeting.”
“But the coffee it made before that was amazing!” I’d protested. “Even Mr. Peters said so!”
Back in the present, my phone buzzes again. I finally pull it out to find a string of increasingly desperate texts from my neighbor and bestest friend Alli.
I should have seen these coming after I messaged her the second I left the HR meeting.
Alli:
Did you remember to pack your desk?
Hello??? Are you even checking your phone???
Meatball!!!
Please tell me you’re not ‘organizing’ anything.
I got wine for tonight! We’re going to need it, aren’t we?
OMG, you’re organizing something, aren’t you?
I tuck the phone away, determined to finish my masterpiece,and maybe ignore her pleas. A junior accountant peers around the corner of her cubicle, her eyes wide in wonder as I stack files according to my new revolutionary system.
“It’s really quite simple,” I explain to anyone within earshot. “Each color represents not just a category, but a feeling, an energy!” I spin in place, arms spread wide, nearly knocking over a potted plant that’s already survived two previous encounters with my enthusiasm this week. Oops.
The security guard walking past doesn’t even break stride anymore when he sees me. We’ve developed a sort of understanding over the months. He pretends not to notice the minor chaos in my wake, and I pretend not to notice him adding extra incident report forms to his clipboard whenever I’m around.
But they’ll see. Once everything’s properly color-coded and organized, they’ll realize this system is exactly what the office needs. I’m leaving this place better than I found it, even if I have to reorganize every file, relabel every drawer, and ignore every increasingly panicked text from Alli to do it. Maybe they’ll even ask me to stay.
My phone buzzes one final time.
Alli:
I’m buying TWO bottles of wine.
Come straight to my place!
“The beauty of my system lies in its intuitive nature,” I explain to Janet from the marketing department. Her coffee cup trembles slightly in her hand as I demonstrate. The fluorescent lights catch the glitter cascading from my sticky notes, creating tiny constellations on the carpet that the janitor will probably add to my growing list of workplace infractions.
“See, it’s all about the psychological associations,” I continue, warming to my subject as Janet takes an instinctive step backward. “Blue is for financial documents because water is blue and money flows like water.” I wave a stack of blue-tagged files with perhaps more force than necessary. “Red is for urgent items because danger! Yellow is for pending items because of caution, like a traffic light. And purple”—I pause for dramatic effect—“is for miscellaneous because… Well, purple is just awesome!”
Janet’s eyes dart toward the exit, but I’m too excited to let her escape. This is my chance to prove that not all my ideas end in disaster. I grab another handful of files, determined to demonstrate the elegant simplicity of my vision. “When you think about it, it’s really just applying basic color theory to office organization. Like how fast-food restaurants use red and yellow to stimulate appetite, except instead of hunger, we’re stimulating efficiency!”
My enthusiasm carries me forward, literally, and I don’t notice how close I’ve gotten to Janet’s desk until my elbow catches her coffee cup. Time seems to slow as I watch the cup fly through the air toward the maintenance guy balanced on his ladder near the ceiling panels. He jerks back to avoid being hit, leaning hard against the ladder. The ladder lurches sideways and slams into the metal fire-suppression sprinkler, breaking it clean off.
There’s a moment of perfect stillness, like the universe holding its breath.
“That’s probably fine,” I say, just as the first drops hit my forehead.
The sprinkler above me erupts with the fury of a miniature monsoon. Screams and shouts fill the air as people scramble to save the computers and documents from the desks nearby. Papers float through the air like waterloggedconfetti, my color-coded system bleeding into a rainbow mess.
