Thursday, December 6, 2007

Freedom of Colors

Background : I work in an office which is more than 90% men, at least in my division.

Our work involves constant creation of presentations and ‘client ready’ Excel sheets. Presentations by design have colors and almost always follow a color theme. What I don’t understand is why, without fail, the color theme in almost all the presentations is either blue or grey. Apparently, these are the more ‘professional colors’. But the questions is : who labeled them as professional. My hunch is it was a bunch of ‘professional men’, who just wanted to play safe.

I have not understood what they have against all the other colors (and I am not talking on behalf of pink only!). Green is supposed to be the most soothing color to the eyes (it’s the centre of the color spectrum visible to the human eye, and the reason why hospital gowns are green). Reds and other colors are perfectly fine colors too.

We probably spend half our working day with those presentations and excels. Why can we not have a different color in them?

Men and Stuffed Toys

Ever wondered why only women like stuffed toys and men don’t. Well, here’s my theory on this :

It’s not that men don’t like stuffed toys. It’s that if they admit that they do like them, the rest of the men would tease them immensely for that. No guy would ever admit in public that he’s not offended by stuffed toys and that he would not mind having a couple of them in his room.

Of course, there is no way to test this point. It’s a vicious circle. The moment a guy agrees to this theory, it would imply that he likes stuffed toys and hence he cannot admit it in public.

P.S. : Replace ‘stuffed toys’ with ‘flowers’ and the same theory holds