My name is John. My job is to paint black and white stripes. It was the most desirable job for several years. Everybody wanted to do what I did. Very well paid, good social status, got married and had a daughter. We lived in this beautiful house not far from the city but far enough to call it our little paradise. I usually drop my girl to school and head to work.
Work was quite simple. I get a job sheet and there were the stripes that you need to draw. Black and white stripes. Sometimes with different width and sometimes with different colors. But it was always used to be black and white. And it even used to have a thumbnail. But then, One day at work I get a notice saying the following.
IMPORTANT NOTICE
The name for each color has changed. We are trying to figure out from the UN what name represents which color. But since we need to keep up with our competitors we are going to implement every new rule as soon as possible. And this is the first of many to follow and we need you to keep up with the changes by the end of each day and it needs to be reworked for the previous projects also.
Rule 1 — Blacks are now called whites.
Rule 2 — Whites and now called blacks.
There was a major discovery in science about some waveform technology that had altered almost everything that used to be the norms. Simple things like a coffee bean used to make coffee now it cannot be called coffee or coffee bean because that same property of coffee is exhibited by another object for example if coffee and tea switched, from now on coffee will inherently taste as tea and tea will inherently taste like coffee. And so on.
Everything fell apart. The meaning of everything was lost. What we used to know meant nothing anymore. It was all different and every government, the UN started changing norms for every possible abnormality. And so the companies started giving out notices now and then that these need to be changed for so and so reason and it needs to be applied for all the previous products. So I get this notice one day as a daily memo.
And so it began. I had to change all my work to this format and it didn’t stop at that. Then they started calling the blues, black. After a while, somehow red was supposed to be called white. And the white was named yellow. Yellow was called orange for a while but that didn’t change anything because orange was still called orange. And we had to do this to every other project we have worked with, every other day we will get a notice of changes that were normal the day before and now it’s all different.
People couldn’t catch up. Most of us lost our jobs. And that was universal. Big time capitalists couldn’t run the company. Billionaires went bankrupt overnight. We were getting old for this shit. We were agitated and fed up. My daughter’s school shut down cause the teachers were on the new training facilities for them to change their perspective of everything. The ones who couldn’t change failed. The ones who were catching up lost all the meaning to life. They said my daughter cannot be called daughter anymore since they changed that to some crap.
There was a time when I used to be proud of my job. The work I do, whatever it was. I used to believe it changed something, caused some effect in the world I live in. In my tiny little world with my family, friends. Some kind of effect. Some kind of goodwill.
Well, after a long time, I feel that again.
I feel like I’m going to change something or at least be proud of myself for doing this.
I decided to disobey.