It was the annual office clean out day and Marie was ecstatic. She loved having everything just-so. She loved when the office smelled vaguely of faux-lemon cleaner and all hints of dust had been moved into bins. However, her office was always so busy that she, and anyone like her, never had the time to do this. That was the beauty of cleaning day though, time to refresh the office and dig out your desk.
There was another reason that Marie was excited for clean out day though. About nine months ago, she had been in charge of a marketing project for their latest product: sunscreen that smelled like cherries. The company, and Marie, had had high hopes for this product. Surveys had shown that the smell of sunscreen was one of the main complaints of average consumers. The team thought cherry would be a fun choice and went ahead with it.
As part of the marketing, Marie was in charge of coming up with some freebies for the product. Since it was sunscreen, she thought sunglasses would be a good one. They fit the theme and were easy to get made and certainly came in a cherry red. She had ordered a bunch up and they came in before the product itself.
The sunscreen hit the shelves and tons of pairs of sunglasses were handed out. It seemed the company had a hit on its hands. Unfortunately, the success was very short-lived.
It turned out that the chemicals in the cherry sent irritated most people's skin and, unfortunately, turned people the color of cherries. As an extra punch to the gut, Marie had thought that having the sunglasses scented the same way would be fun. So now, all of those freebies were turning people's faces bright red.
The company had quietly nixed the project and made some settlements. Most of the sunglasses had been given out, but Marie still had the first batch of ten at her desk. She didn't want to remind anyone that they had been her idea, so she kept them hidden in her desk. But it was clean up day and Marie thought she'd manage to get them in the trash.
She put them on a big trash pile along with some broken office supplies and thought that would be it.
Later in the day, she found that the bag of sunglasses had made its way, somehow to a free pile. Marie panicked and quickly returned them to the trash pile. None had been taken, much to Marie's relief, but Marie shot a quick email to HR just in case. These could not get out.
When she went to check on the pile later, the bag had moved, again, to the freebie pile. Luckily, Marie caught two of her co-workers unwrapping the sunglasses before they managed to take the selfie she'd heard them planning.
This time, when she moved the sunglasses back to the trash bins, she wrote up a note:
DO NOT TAKE OUT OF THIS BIN
That should do it, Marie thought.
Later in the day, thinking her problem was solved, a bespectacled woman from HR came to visit her at her cubicle. She had bright red skin sitting directly under the lines of her glasses. She tapped her foot impatiently and stared angrily at Marie.
"I put a note," Marie said weakly.
(Prompt by Elena Westbrook)
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