Black and White: The Author’s Awakening
It was sometime in the early 2000s.
Fourth hosting migration.
Meetings, HR, IT, legal, finance—rituals of acquisition.
Then came the sales department.
I arrived armed.
Not with insight, but with PowerPoint.
Thirty slides, radiant with color.
Fonts curated. Charts aligned.
Marketing images so glossy they practically winked.
Amdahl—yes, that Amdahl—was the setting.
The startup that once outpaced IBM, 250% growth in a year.
Slide one: “Introduction to X in Sales.”
Slide two: Legal statement.
Slide three: A vibrant infographic—because nothing says “technical clarity” like a stock photo of a handshake.
And then, from the shadows:
“Color? We only do black and white.”
I paused. “What is in black and white?”
The reply: “Everything.”
Cue existential crisis.
Suddenly, my masterpiece of corporate theater felt like a clown suit.
PowerPoint—the sacred manager’s tool—had betrayed me.
All that time spent nudging arrows and choosing the perfect shade of blue...
For what?
To be told, in a room of thirty seasoned minds, that color was noise.
These people had begun their journeys
with handwritten transparencies.
No transitions. No bullet points. No Polish. No gloss.
Just breath, rhythm, and the occasional smudge of truth.
I apologized. Promised to improve.
Inside, I understood:
Thirty slides in color could have been seven in black and white.
The joy I felt in the palette faded.
But handwriting—
Handwriting is different.
It is pure content.
It bypasses the eye and enters presence.
No animations. No templates.
Just the moment, unfiltered.
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