Re: Keeping the Color Wheel Real

To: All Employees

From: The CRO

Greetings from your new CRO. What’s a CRO, you ask? Chief Realness Officer, obs. I’m just messing with you. I’d never heard of it either until I was promoted to the position a few days ago. Why was I promoted? Here’s what happened. Last week the CEO and the CFO got together with the CPO (Chief People Officer, for those of you who didn’t read the last memo) to address the fact that the marketing folks had straight up lost it. Recent appellations approved by the Color Naming Department (CND) were so bananas that tweets ridiculing our company’s color names exceeded tweets ridiculing the blue check mark maneuver. Something had to be done to bring back truth in color naming. The Chief Color Naming Officer was fired, and all of his underlings were placed on PIPs (performance improvement plans, for those of you who didn’t read the memo before the last memo). I now head the CND and was given this spiffy new title because management determined that I’m someone who keeps things real. Management arrived at this conclusion in part because the CPO overheard me telling my then-supervisor (shout-out to Donut Dan!) “You don’t know jack,” with impunity. Moreover, I apparently have “the look” of someone who keeps things real. I wonder what they mean by that? Kidding. We all know what they mean by that!

Without further ado, here are the name changes to the following shades of grey: Paint Chips 51 to 55 on the company color wheel.

• Paint Chip 51, previously Will I? Won’t I?, will be known as Unconstructive Criticism.
• Paint Chip 52, previously November Tundra, will be known as Credit Application Denied.
• Paint Chip 53, previously Hard Rain Sans Rainbow, will be known as Slum Lord Parking Lot at Dusk.
• Paint Chip 54, previously A.I. Heart, will be known as If Only My Lawyer Had Asked Followup Questions.
• Paint Chip 55, previously Abyss Entrance, will be known as 2022 Elections Postmortem. (That last one was a tossup; I almost went with Big Sads.)

Stay tuned for next week’s memo, in which I’ll highlight name changes on the yellow spectrum. Is it giving away too much to say that celestial references are out and fluid-based designations are in? I doubt it. Until then, keep keeping it real.

Oh, one more thing. Karen, I know what you tried to rename Golden Hour Flower Power. Not on my watch. Don’t pull a stunt like that again.