So little depended upon an office coloring contest. Solomon’s superiors had designed the competition to foster community and holiday spirit. Solomon scoffed at the affair while his cohort placed bets on the previous years’ winners. Their conspiring whispering intoned he would not win, but by office policy, he would have to participate nonetheless. None of it had any impact on his career.
His career was to read customers. Read them, decipher them, understand them, identify a problem, and supply digestible answers. His simple customers were itemized receipts. The complex ones were tomes of illegible handwriting, missing pages, and stains. They all came to Solomon desperate, calm, irate, hopeless, and their emotions added setting and tone to their stories. If he were to have any emotion, himself, Solomon could distort the literature. Reading, therefore, was a fine art of emotionless objectivity.
When confronted with his own problems, Solomon sloughed this art and lay naked in illiteracy. He slouched before his computer, his throne after work. He had mustered enough energy to undo the top buttons of his dress shirt, revealing a ragged white t-shirt grayed from overuse and color wash cycles. As he fiddled with the freed buttons, he reviewed his website. He scanned for problems.
In video games, Solomon could avoid evaluating problems. He could sink into his couch and allow a glaze to drip over his eyes. Here, he could relax. Given a measurable objective, he could accomplish something and receive instant praise for his success. He could spend time with his partner and friends, bound by a joint goal and distraction. He could compete in an arena in which he had weathered and won countless battles.
In the arena of office coloring, however, the odds did not favor him, so he sought to undermine the affair. He could not draw, but he could sketch crude figures engaged in cartoonish ritualistic sacrifice. Coloring irritated him, yet he had committed to his satire and relied on colored pencils to scratch in shading. His skills had not improved much since elementary school, so his strokes strayed across lines and left gashes of white in between themselves. He could acknowledge his art was amateurish, but he assured himself he had tried his best and could sway the vote with his originality.
He struggled to reassure himself in his actual work. He littered his office desk with notes and numbers and analyses. He had read through the library of his customer base and pinpointed every issue. Potential answers to these issues buzzed in his head, but he struggled to translate them into user-friendly language. Unable to produce such results, Solomon resorted to delivering piecemeal plans to his customers, hoping these pseudo-solutions would cause more than the placebo effect. He had done this for years, far too long to blame his ignorance any longer. Unlike reading, his efficacy was subjective, and personal reassurance could not alter his results.
He slipped into blind observation. His website muddled into a constellation of blotches. Editing and formatting mistakes surfaced from the murk, and he dashed them from the screen. Through the film of his eyes, he was aware of the shadows of audio issues, obtuse sentence structures, anemic comedy, and a poor social media presence. They loomed in the distance, creatures which had merged and mutated to a fractal of immense darkness. He closed his eyes.
And clenched his teeth as the game over screen flashed. He exited to the online lobby and boiled in contempt as the next match loaded. Internet gaming was an ocean of experienced players in which Solomon was a large freshwater fish. Each consecutive loss strained his muscles and wore at his nerves. He swore, shook, and hissed through his teeth. He blamed faulty game mechanics and his partner’s poor plays. Solomon could not bear losing.
He had won nothing though. The email indicated the favored artists had pulled ahead with their quaint and creative coloring. He glowered at the laptop screen and read the email again. His temples droned, and his indignation cried that he had been robbed and invalidated. He deserved some recognition, something. His pettiness was not lost on him, but he had tried so hard.
He tried as hard as he could each day of work, but his skills grew dull from overuse. His colleagues spoke of trainings and books and articles which could expand his repertoire, and it all nauseated him. Each outlet required additional time outside of work, and the Monday-through-Friday grind had made a fine dust out of his motivation. As he taped together his fragmented solutions for his customers, he pled to himself his work was good enough. No one had criticized his work yet, so he was not obligated to change.
No one had criticized his website. Apart from friends and family, no one was reading or watching either. When he opened his eyes, he stared blankly at the front page. He saw the evils of inadequacy and recognized he could slay them. If anyone else saw them, they rarely commented. No one needed change. Sinking deeper into his chair, he clawed at the lid of his laptop and shut it. He reasoned he could fix things once he had an audience. Without one, he could be flawed.
He was flawed. As he lost another round, he yelled at the TV, a foam of profanity and complaints frothing from his mouth. His partner flinched and averted eye contact. She whispered condolences, and Solomon growled at her and spat venom. He was not good enough to win. He could not control his anger nor restrain it from his partner. He could not stop himself from entering the game once more. He was flawed, and he seethed with this understanding. He could change, but his body screamed with rage. Why could everyone not accept him as he was? Why was he not good enough? Why did he have to change?
His partner stood up and walked out of the room, her footsteps painfully measured to appear natural. Her movement filled Solomon with spite; her absence, with dread. He had to change, but he was exhausted from being. The ideal of himself haunted him, raking at his shoulders and gnawing at the back of his head. He pressed against the couch. As the new round began in his game, Solomon merged further into the furniture and lost himself in the cushions of self-pity.