Two Tones

The station was busier than usual. I walked down the worn concrete steps into a surprising jostle of commuters. The city noises faded away as I descended, but they were replaced with cell-phone conversations and someone busking passionately in a hallway somewhere further along. The jangly guitar added a buzz to the crowd that made it feel like I was standing outside a nightclub at 3am.

I gently and politely elbowed my way through the crowd towards my platform. The mix of languages around me covered almost every continent in the space of fifty feet. I pulled my headphones from my briefcase and tuned out from the busyness around me. The gentle Korean pop music helped me focus as I thought about the presentation. Marketing had borne the brunt of the changes and I had a lot to reorganize. I grimaced. Product launches were always such a nightmare.

The engineering team hadn’t told anyone about the colors on the hardshell plastic not matching the anodized aluminum until last week. Half of the aluminum parts were already at the assembly plant, and the rest were being shipped there this month. Changing the plastic parts would be easier, but we had already been storing crates of plastic components on site for months. So now it was up to my team to spin it as a “unique two-tone colorway.”

We stepped onto the train. It whooshed softly as it picked up speed out of the station. Disappearing into the cavernous darkness of the underground tunnel network, I closed my eyes and tilted my head back, resting it against the handrail I stood next to. It jolted me as we came to a screeching stop. Everyone on the train was thrown to the floor. I lay on top of someone else, and two people were inadvertently pinning me down. Everyone was shouting. Then I heard a deeper rumble. The scrambling paused, I smelled gasoline and dust, and a wall of fire ripped into the cabin. It was like a furnace. All I could think about in the midst of the deadly chaos was the face of the chief engineer as he explained how hard it is to match the color of two different materials.