You must get out now. Resign your position without notice. Leave behind your personal mementoes and ornaments. If homelessness awaits you, embrace it, for it is your escape. It may already be too late. I know this is true, because your story was once mine.
I was once like you, a happy man in an office in a department of a company. This company processed substances, and was a leader in its field according to all the substance-processing trade journals. Its employees were content and productive, and were given needed office supplies without excessive paperwork. Suddenly my department received a white message board, and colored markers with which to make colored marks on the board. We were puzzled. We had no need of such a thing. It had no purpose. It was not relevant to our role in the processing of substances. Therefore we ignored it and continued to work productively and contentedly.
One day there was a picture on the board, a picture of a clown. It was drawn in color, and we surmised that it had been done with the markers that had come with the message board. But the clown seemed also to have no relevance to the efficient processing of substances, and we paid it no more attention. Time passed. No one today remembers when the first of the clown dolls appeared in the department’s display case. By the time we noticed it, the display case was so full of clowns that they obscured our view of samples of the substances we had so proudly helped to process. But they did not interfere with our daily work, and were soon forgotten, as were the circus posters that appeared on our walls at about the same time. The air, barely perceptibly, began to smell different, but we assumed that the company was merely processing some new substance and soon we were unconscious of that as well.
I remember a fellow employee, whom I shall call Bob Elliott because I do not want to bother with thinking up a fake name for him, saying to me “I am feeling a trifle sick of clowns. That clown on the message board, for example, is downright creepy. It is not even well-drawn, it looks as if it were done by a child. Tonight, after work, I intend to erase it, and if my courage does not fail me, I shall write on the message board a statement to the effect that a clown motif is not pertinent to this department’s mission in the processing of substances.” I was surprised at his vehemance, having long since stopped noticing clowns myself, but I agreed to keep his words secret.
The next day, the poorly-drawn clown on the message board was still there. Bob Elliott was not. His disappearance created a stir in the department, and the remaining employees, though still productive, were measurably less content. The company reacted to this by announcing that it would provide ambient noise generators which had been scientifically proven to elevate mood and decrease stress. They were installed that afternoon. Someone remarked that no matter which setting the machines were on – waterfall, rain forest, surf – the same sound was produced, like static or the roar of a large crowd of people. But as the sound played at a low volume and was not offensive, the employees shrugged and went back to work.
And then, when all of us had blinded ourselves to the clowns, numbed ourselves against the smell of the greasepaint and deafened ourselves to the roar of the crowd, it happened. We were defenseless when they came for us, bearing rubber noses and strong adhesive. The company’s “process” was finally complete.
We are all clowns now. None but me knows that we have ever been anything else, and I know I shall soon forget. Please do not forget me.
