Hot Take

Chapter 1: The Color of Nothing

The walls of Midland Mutual Insurance were a shade of beige that didn't exist in nature. Rachel Allen had once tried to find it on a paint swatch at the hardware store, holding up card after card of Desert Sand, Toasted Almond, and Pale Bisque, but none of them quite captured the particular existential flatness of the color that surrounded her for forty-plus hours every week. It was a beige that had given up. A beige that had once dreamed of being tan but settled. If sadness had an interior decorator, this would be the showroom.

Rachel sat in her cubicle—third row, second from the window, close enough to see natural light but not close enough to benefit from it—and stared at the PowerPoint presentation on her laptop screen. The slide read: CONFLICT RESOLUTION: TURNING PROBLEMS INTO PARTNERSHIPS. She'd made this deck four years ago. She'd presented it roughly eighty times. She could deliver it in her sleep, and based on the feedback forms, her audience was usually doing exactly that.

"You're still here?" Pam Richter appeared over the cubicle wall like a prairie dog with reading glasses and a Diet Coke. Pam had occupied the adjacent cubicle for seven years, and the two of them had developed the kind of bond that only forms between people who share a microwave and a mutual understanding that everything around them was mildly absurd.

"I'm tweaking the deck for Thursday," Rachel said.

"You've been tweaking that deck since the Obama administration."

"I changed a font last month."

"To what?"

"Calibri."

"From what?"

"...Calibri Light."

Pam took a long sip of her Diet Coke, maintaining eye contact in a way that communicated volumes. "Rachel. It's five-fifteen on a Tuesday. Gary left at four. The cleaning crew is going to think you live here."

Gary Nesbit was their department head, a man who had perfected the art of being in charge without doing anything. He had a corner office with a motivational poster that said TEAMWORK above a photo of rowers, and Rachel had never once seen him row, metaphorically or otherwise. Gary's primary management technique was forwarding emails with "FYI" written above them and then taking credit for whatever happened next.

"I just want to make sure the interactive portion flows better," Rachel said. "Last time, someone in accounting fell asleep during the role-play exercise, and when he woke up, he thought he was actually being fired."

"That's the most engaged anyone's ever been in one of your sessions."

"He cried, Pam."

"Tears of engagement."

Rachel closed the laptop and leaned back in her chair, which responded with its customary squeak of protest. She was thirty-seven years old, and she had been working at Midland Mutual Insurance for nine years—long enough for the building to feel less like a workplace and more like a terrarium she'd accidentally sealed herself inside. She was good at her job. The feedback forms said so, in the sense that people consistently rated her sessions as "fine" and "professional" and "the chairs were comfortable." Nobody ever complained about Rachel Allen. Nobody ever raved about her either. She existed in the corporate middle distance, competent and utterly invisible.

This was not, she understood, a tragedy. Plenty of people lived invisible lives and found meaning in other places. Rachel had her mother, Janet, who lived forty minutes away in a small house in Westerville and was increasingly forgetful in ways that were starting to feel less charming and more clinical. She had Pam, who was the kind of friend who would help you move a body but would also make fun of you for the way you loaded the trunk. She had a one-bedroom apartment with a cat named Business Casual, who had been named in a moment of wine-fueled irony and who answered to nothing.

What Rachel did not have was any sense that her life was building toward something. It felt like a long hallway with identical doors, and she'd stopped checking to see if any of them were unlocked.

"Come on," Pam said, standing up and grabbing her coat. "Let's get tacos. You look like someone who needs a taco."

"I always look like that."

"Exactly."

They walked out through the lobby, past the reception desk where a bowl of mints had been sitting since at least 2019, past the framed mission statement that used the word "synergy" three times in four sentences, and into the parking lot, where the November air hit Rachel's face like a slap of reality. Columbus in autumn was all gray sky and damp pavement, and Rachel's Honda Civic sat under a streetlight that buzzed with the electrical enthusiasm of something that wanted very much to die.

"You know what I was thinking about today?" Rachel said as they got into Pam's car, a sensible Subaru with a bumper sticker that read I'D RATHER BE READING.

"Was it work-related? Because if so, I'm going to need something stronger than a taco."

"Do you remember when I first started, and I had all those ideas about revamping the onboarding program? Making it actually useful?"

Pam turned the key in the ignition. "Vaguely. That was back when you still had hope."

"I wrote a whole proposal. Twelve pages. Gary said he'd 'circle back' on it."

"Did he?"

"It's been nine years, Pam."

"That's a very wide circle."

They drove to La Paloma, a taco place wedged between a nail salon and a store that sold nothing but phone cases. Rachel ordered her usual—two carnitas, extra lime—and they sat in a booth with cracked vinyl seats and a TV in the corner playing a basketball game nobody was watching.

"I don't mean to be dramatic," Rachel said, poking at a chip, "but do you ever feel like we're just... furniture? Like, the company would function exactly the same if we were replaced by a laminated poster with bullet points?"

"Bold of you to assume they haven't considered it," Pam said. "I heard Gary asked IT about an automated training module last month."

Rachel's stomach dropped. "What?"

"I'm kidding." Pam paused. "Mostly. He did ask about it, but IT told him it would cost money, so he lost interest."

"Comforting."

"The point is, you're good at what you do. You're just doing it in a place that wouldn't notice if the building was on fire unless someone sent a calendar invite about it."

Rachel ate her taco and stared at the basketball game. A player dunked, and the crowd went wild, and she thought about how strange it was that some people got to do things that made rooms full of strangers lose their minds, and she got to explain the difference between passive-aggressive and assertive communication to people who were checking their phones under the table.

Her phone buzzed. She looked down. It was an email from someone named Lorraine Schafer, with the subject line: URGENT - Keynote Speaker Needed - Heartland Business Leadership Conference.

Rachel almost deleted it. She got spam all the time—emails about webinars and networking events and once, memorably, an invitation to a "Mindfulness Retreat for Insurance Professionals," which had struck her as a contradiction in terms.

But something made her open it.

Dear Ms. Allen,

I'm writing on behalf of the Heartland Business Leadership Conference, which takes place this Friday in Indianapolis. Our keynote speaker, Todd Finkle, has come down with a severe case of food poisoning (bad oysters at the pre-conference mixer—long story) and will be unable to present. Your name was recommended by a mutual colleague, and we're hoping you might be available to step in. The topic is "Building Authentic Workplace Culture." Compensation is $1,500 plus travel. I know this is incredibly last minute, and I apologize for the short notice.

Please let me know ASAP.

Best,
Lorraine Schafer
Conference Coordinator

Rachel read it twice. Then she showed it to Pam.

"Fifteen hundred dollars to give a speech?" Pam said. "That's more than Gary pays you for a week of actual work."

"I can't do this. I've never given a keynote. I train people on how to fill out incident reports without crying."

"Same skill set, bigger room."

"Pam."

"Rachel." Pam leaned forward. "When is the last time anything interesting happened to you?"

Rachel opened her mouth. Closed it. Thought hard.

"Business Casual knocked a glass off the counter yesterday," she offered.

"That's the cat being interesting. I'm asking about you."

Rachel looked at the email again. Fifteen hundred dollars. Her mother's latest prescription had cost four hundred, and that was after insurance. The car needed new brakes. The ceiling in her bathroom had a water stain that was either growing or she was losing her mind.

"I don't even know what I'd say."

"Say what you always say to me. About how corporate culture is broken and nobody wants to admit it. Except, you know, make it sound intentional."

Rachel picked up another chip, put it down, and picked up her phone.

She typed: Dear Lorraine, I'd be happy to step in. Thank you for thinking of me.

She hit send before she could think about it, and immediately felt like she'd jumped off a cliff without checking if there was water at the bottom.

"I'm going to throw up," she said.

"Save it for the keynote," Pam said. "It worked for Todd Finkle."

That night, Rachel sat on her couch with Business Casual sprawled across her lap, staring at a blank Word document on her laptop. The cursor blinked at her with what felt like judgment.

Building Authentic Workplace Culture, she typed at the top of the page.

Then she sat there for forty-five minutes.

The problem wasn't that she had nothing to say. The problem was that everything she had to say was the kind of thing you weren't supposed to say. In nine years of HR training, Rachel had accumulated a vast internal catalog of corporate absurdities—the performative all-hands meetings, the trust falls that nobody trusted, the "open door policies" attached to doors that were always closed, the wellness initiatives that amounted to putting a bowl of apples next to the vending machine that sold Doritos. She knew, with the bone-deep certainty of someone who had watched it happen hundreds of times, that most workplace culture initiatives were wallpaper over rot.

But you didn't say that in a keynote. In a keynote, you said things like "empowerment" and "stakeholder alignment" and "intentional growth" and everyone nodded and went back to doing exactly what they'd been doing before.

She tried writing something conventional. She got three bullet points in and deleted them all. She tried again. Deleted again. Business Casual purred, indifferent to her suffering.

At midnight, she had half a page of notes that read less like a speech and more like a list of grievances. She stared at it, decided it was terrible, closed the laptop, and went to bed.

She dreamed about standing in front of a crowd in her underwear, which felt a little on the nose.