Liam Connors

The classroom in Hugh Hall was my favorite. I think the paint on the walls was called Bone.

Not white. Never white.

We sat in auditorium-style seats that folded back into themselves when they were empty, and the desks were just writing tablets that swung out from the side of the chair. The seats were dark plastic with no padding.

There was a blackboard at the front. Not a whiteboard like the bigger classrooms, just a regular old blackboard with different colored chalk and dusty erasers.

This was the only classroom that I’d been in with windows. Usually, the blinds were pulled down, but when they weren’t I had found that my interest in the lives of pigeons far outweighed my interest in finding the derivatives of any particular function.

There was a projector on the ceiling and a little screen that had to be pulled down. Our professor could never get it on the first try. The screen always got stuck, and the kid in the front always had to help. I sat in the back.

I took my notes in a three-subject college-ruled notebook. I’d always been told not to do math with a pen, but I couldn’t stand the way pencils squeaked when you wrote on fresh paper.

I had Calculus there.

The classroom in The Stone Building is where I had my Physics class. The paint on the walls was called Eggshell.

Not white. Never white.

It was one of those classrooms with stadium seating, so sitting in the back meant I was about 10 feet above my professor.

He didn’t have a desk or a podium. Instead, he did his work on a large black table with spouts for methane coming out of the side, and a double sink, and a bunch of goggles hanging all over the front.

He would always pick his nose with his pinky finger as he droned about the lesson. There had to be a million boogers under that black table.

Behind him were two whiteboards, one on either side. There were words spread out all over the boards from the class before. Words that were never erased, so I’d spend the whole class wondering what in the world that last class was learning about, because out of context it seemed so foreign.

There was a poster of the periodic table above him, lest we ever forget that Vanadium’s atomic number was 23.

Again, we had those little desks that flipped out from the side compartment, then flipped back in when we were done. If you were left-handed, you had to sit at the end of the row in order to find a desk that swung out from the left side.

This classroom was always full, so you never got to sit alone. There was always a student to your right, and one to your left. One always smelt bad.
Professor Navarro taught that class.

The classroom in the basement of the Jade Memorial Library was my English classroom. Here, they called it Introductory Writing. The walls were painted Coconut.

Not white, never white.

Our desks were real desks, they didn’t flip to one side or the other, and the seats were freezing cold. They were placed in a circle so that everyone could see everyone else.

It was a small classroom, so we were all squeezed together. There was no projector.

The professor had an oak podium that he kept some papers on, but during class, he would join the circle with us. He really hated class systems. He wore a pair of browline-framed glasses that matched the elbow pads on his jacket, but we knew they were fake because he took them off whenever he had to read. I was pretty sure he’d only started teaching so that he had an excuse to dress like that.

He told us each of our papers had to be 5 pages. No more, no less. Each paragraph, 5 sentences. There had to be an opening argument. There had to be a closing argument. There had to be supporting statements. We needed a thesis. 1500 words maximum.

On the first day, he told us about a student he had last semester. She was one of the worst writers he’d ever seen. For their final paper, they were supposed to connect one of the readings to a modern social movement. She talked about feminism in the book Lolita. Our professor didn’t believe that Lolita had anything to do with feminism. Plus, she wrote 6 paragraphs. So, he had to fail her. The textbook for that class was $76.83.

After all these classes I went back to my dorm at Liza Square. The paint on the walls in the hallway was Cotton. They were lined with reminders to get our vaccines for Meningitis and HPV. I made sure that I was always all caught up on my shots.

There were flyers for club meetings and open-mic nights, tutors and intramural soccer sign-ups.

Our Resident Assistant stayed in his room unless someone got drunk enough to throw up, which was usually two or three times a week, and he made them call an ambulance.

I lived in Room 3F. My dorm room was painted Pearl.

I’d sit in my room and read one of the passages I was assigned. It always had to do with success and reaching success, and the pathway to success, and how to deal with success.

And then I’d lie down, and look up at the ceiling. The paint on the ceiling was called Snow. But it didn’t look like Snow at all. To me, it just looked white.

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The first office they called me into was the hiring manager’s. The paint on the wall was called Ash.

Not gray. Never gray.

I sat in a leather office chair with polished wooden arms. The back left leg was missing its felt footpad so it kept shifting with my body weight. If I got nervous and started to tap my foot, the chair would make a noise, so I had to keep reminding myself not to tap my foot.

There was a carpet on the floor that matched the walls, except it had a pattern of intersecting diamonds. If you looked close, you could see that wasn’t a real carpet, just interlocking carpet tiles. They could have just as easily installed a real carpet.

There was a big calendar hanging on the wall behind his head. I wondered if he’d remembered his lunch with Rachel at 12:30.

The room smelt of stale coffee, and there were heat rings stained on the desk even though he had a set of coasters next to his keyboard. He studied my resume. I paid my friend to pay his friend to make that resume for me. It said that I’d had four years’ experience, but really I’d only had three and a half.
He told me that I got the job.

My boss’s office was much bigger. The wall was painted Charcoal.

Not gray. Never gray.

The temperature in that office was always a few degrees lower than everywhere else, and if you stayed in there too long the air conditioning gave you a headache.

On the wall to the left of her desk hung a picture of a lion chasing a gazelle, with the word PROSPER in big white letters written right underneath. I couldn’t tell if the lion was prosperous, or the gazelle.

Behind her desk was a long window, and the blinds were always open. On a sunny day, you had to squint just to see her right in front of you. It provided a stunning view of the parking lot.

She always smiled. Even when she was saying something means, she’d smile. You never knew what she was about to say because her facial expression never changed.

She taught me all of the different ways to make our product sound good. It wasn’t a very good product, but that didn’t matter. If we told the customer that it was good, they’d believe it. So, we always told the customer how good our product was.

Her name was Sheila.

I liked the break room best. They had repainted it after my first year, so it went from Flint to Pewter.

Not gray. Never gray.

The room was as big as two offices combined, and there were four round tables to sit at. I always sat at the back left one. I hated it when someone else would take my seat.

The floor wasn’t carpeted like everywhere else. Instead, porcelain tiles spanned the room, sporadically stained where the cleaning crew had been defeated in their quest to save it.

On the back wall was a magnetic dartboard, but all the darts were missing except one. There was a stack of board games in the corner, but no one ever played them, though Monopoly was often referenced in meetings.

Most of what was in the refrigerator had logged more hours in the office than I had. The carton of Fruit Punch on the second shelf had never once been touched in all the time I’d been there.

There were two vending machines in there, one with drinks and one with snacks. I’d always get Sour Cream & Onion chips with a Pepsi.

We had two coffee makers on the counter. The Keurig made better coffee than the Hamilton Beach, but no one liked to buy the little pods for the Keurig, so I often settled for bad coffee.

We were given a half-hour for a break.

Most of the time, I spent the day in my own office. It was smaller than some of the cubicles, but at least it had a door. No windows, though. The paint on the walls was called Fog.

I was there for eight hours a day, but I really only did about two hours’ worth of work. Sometimes when I would sit there, waiting for something to come onto my desk, I would stare at the wall. The more I looked at it, the more it didn’t look like Fog at all. To me, it just looked gray.

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One day, it will all be black.

The floor and the ceiling, the offices, the desks, and the chairs. Black.

The people. The ones that mattered and the ones that didn’t. None of them will matter. Or they all will.

The words on the whiteboard will be erased, same as the ones on the blackboard. Even the 1500 words on the 5-page paper, they’ll be gone, too. And the projector light will go out.

The bad product will be just as good as the good product, and the good product just as bad as the bad product.

Hamilton Beach coffee will taste the same as Keurig coffee. And they’ll both be taken black.

The blinds will all be closed. The desks swung back in. The seats folded.

The white walls that faded to gray walls will fade again. And it will just be black.

Not dark black or light black. Not Jet or Diesel. Not Licorice.

Just black.