Courtesy of McSweeney’s — CRITIQUE OF YOUR POWERPOINT PRESENTATION TITLED “SALES FORECAST, THIRD QUARTER.”

Another highlight was your complete rejection of Tuftean convention through the use of colors without meaning, location without purpose, and position without movement. How daring it was to represent the quarterly shortfalls in revenue with the color purple—the color associated not only with kings but also with the skin of slaves, an obvious yet powerful homage to Alice Walker’s seminal novel. By rejecting the fixed ironic conventions of green and black (colors of mold, death, and despair) for profits and red (blood and lust) for losses, you transcended the common criticism that capitalism is animalistic and decadent. The postmodern color scheme instead offered a fascinating contradiction, one that simultaneously said, “I am master of my destiny,” and “I am trapped by the projections required as a condition of my employment, and am but a slave to outcomes that are way beyond my control,” and “Feel free to have more cinnamon buns, for I seem to have ordered too many.”

Perfect, just perfect. We may as well approach these things as art and take what amusement we can from them, for all the sense they make otherwise…