Jenkins & Sutter

Once they had gathered in the conference room, Tracy broke the bad news.

“So here’s the deal, guys: They like the work we’ve done, so we don’t have to change anything inside here,” and she held up one of the blue binders that, sadly, represented months of work they’d done for Jenkins & Sutter, who in that time had shot to number one with a bullet on their “worst clients” list.

Tracy continued. “But,”—there were a lot of “buts” with these knuckleheads—“they’ve decided they no longer like the color of the binders, so we’re going to have to get new ones and re-do all of them before we can ship these babies out.”

A moment of stunned silence, followed by a room full of barely audible, resigned curses. Jenkins & Sutter had chosen the color of the binders themselves, and now were deciding at the last minute they didn’t like them. Oh, and the reports were permanently bound; a simple color change for the binders meant more than just transferring the reports from one binder to another. It meant literally trashing all the ones they had, reprinting every page of every copy of every report, and re-assembling new binders from scratch. Perfect.

Julie spoke up. “I have a dream that one day, we will be judged not by the color of our binders, but by the content of our Pareto charts!”

More silence. Tracy stared a hole through Julie, exhaled, said, “Inappropriate, Julie,” and left the room.

And that’s when it hit Julie: It was MLK Day, and she had picked that day to make the man’s most famous speech a punchline for her dumb joke.

She left the conference room sweaty and flushed and made her way to Tracy’s office slowly, rehearsing the words of her apology carefully so as not to commit a second epic foot-in-mouth offense that day.

And then she realized they were working on MLK Day. Jenkins & Sutter had them working on a holiday, making them re-order binders and re-do their whole project because they finally got a sense of color AFTER the binders were put together, and, to top it all off, they had made Julie accidentally act kind of racist. They really were the WORST.