I'm the problem. It's me.

I was an asshole yesterday.

There. Starting strong.

I slept badly, woke up annoyed at absolutely nothing, and then spent the morning behaving as if everyone else had personally arranged this inconvenience for me. Daniel asked whether I wanted coffee and I told him I wanted him to stop asking questions before I’d had coffee, which, yes, I understand the problem with that sentence.

We had a fight. Not a dramatic one. No doors slammed. Nobody packed a suitcase. Just the kind where Daniel eventually said, “Lisa, I’m trying really hard not to make this worse,” and somehow even that annoyed me.

Then at lunch I went to Bennie’s and the woman behind the counter got my order wrong.

I behaved like she’d backed over my dog.

So, before I get anywhere else with this: if you’re reading this, I’m sorry. You did not deserve that. You offered to fix it immediately and I was still rude to you. There isn’t a clever explanation coming later that makes that okay.

Anyway. I took my corrected burrito and my personality disorder back to work.

We had a GDT review that afternoon. Residential interiors. Wall finishes.

Beige.

I have spent more time discussing beige since I started working with GDT than I spent thinking about my entire future in college. And contrary to what everyone in that meeting seems to believe, there are DIFFERENT FUCKING BEIGES.

Warm beige. Gray beige. Pink beige. Beige that looks beautiful in morning light. Beige that makes an expensive apartment look like the waiting room at a dentist who has recently divorced.

These things matter.

Apparently 1,842 women disagreed with me.

One thousand eight hundred and forty-two observations. Same preference. Finish B.

I preferred A.

I explained why.

Nobody argued with me.

That’s the worst part of working with people who have data. They don’t even have the decency to fight.

Someone just moved the presentation to the next slide.

Normally this is where I become professionally irritating. I ask about lighting conditions. Sample size. Age groups. Whether anyone has actually stood in the room instead of staring at a render. Sometimes I say “undertones” enough times that people stop making eye contact with me.

But yesterday I was tired, so I let the beige bastards win.

Then I went home.

My score had dropped.

Quite a lot.

I opened the detail view because obviously I did. And there it was. Not one thing. Not one person having a problem with me.

A pattern.

Negative social responses. Repeated friction. Multiple observations across different interactions.

Different women.

Same direction.

My first response was extremely mature.

Fuck off.

My second response was to look again.

Still there.

So I checked the individual moments I was allowed to see. Not identities. Not some little list of women who had failed to appreciate the Lisa Enzorini Experience. Just enough context to recognize my own day.

And I started arguing with it.

I was tired.

Daniel was being annoying.

The restaurant screwed up my order.

Work was frustrating.

I had reasons.

Perfectly good reasons, actually.

GRACE remained deeply moved by my presentation and changed absolutely nothing.

So I called Audrey.

I told her the whole thing, including the score, which I probably shouldn’t have done because she went quiet in that particular Audrey way that means she’s about to say something reasonable and ruin my evening.

“So you think it’s wrong?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Were you rude to Daniel?”

“Yes, but—”

“And the woman at Bennie’s?”

“Yes.”

“And you were irritated at work?”

“I work with people who think beige is a number, Audrey.”

“I know.”

“You’re supposed to be helping.”

“I am helping.”

This is why having a librarian as a friend is dangerous. They think silence is a legitimate conversational weapon.

Then she asked me what GRACE had actually gotten wrong.

I had an answer ready.

I genuinely did.

And then I couldn’t say it.

Because that was the problem.

GRACE hadn’t decided I was an asshole.

Seven different women hadn’t gotten together over lunch and voted on whether Lisa Enzorini was being a pain in the ass.

They had each reacted to me.

Separately.

And GRACE had noticed.

Which is when I thought about the fucking beige.

1,842 women.

Different rooms. Different days. Different lives.

Same direction.

I have spent months sitting in GDT meetings thinking that numbers like that flatten everything interesting out of design. That you can’t reduce taste to a response curve. That sometimes one person standing in the right room can see something 1,842 people missed.

I still believe that, by the way.

Finish A was better.

I will die on this hill and apparently be buried in a beautifully warm neutral.

But for the first time, I understood why nobody in that meeting needed to argue with me.

They weren’t saying my opinion didn’t matter.

They were saying it was one opinion.

That’s different.

And yesterday, for a few hours, so was I.

One person with a bad night’s sleep, a bad mood and a very convincing internal explanation for why everyone else was the problem.

Turns out everyone else was not the problem.

Horrible system. Would not recommend.

Anyway, Daniel got an apology. The woman at Bennie’s gets one too, properly, in person, next time I’m there.

And this morning I asked GDT if I could see the outliers on Finish B.

Not because I suddenly worship the numbers.

Because now I want to know what the people who disagreed saw.

Apparently that’s growth.

Fucking exhausting.

And Finish A is still better.