“I can boil it down super quick. The TL;DR of it is this, Ted—we got you some new pillows to try and they’re on your bed. They’re the ones in black pillowcases. The regular ones are in white pillowcases. When you decide which one you like best, we’ll switch the rest over.”

A storm cloud moved in, or at least it felt that way. Ted’s forehead wrinkled and his lips peeled up. Uh-oh, Zanne thought. Mark was going about this all wrong. You never informed Ted of something this complicated verbally. You sent him an email, giving him time to read and digest, and if you anticipated he’d have questions, you put time on the calendar to walk through them together live. Doing it like this made Ted feel like he had to remember things—dumb, unimportant, color-coded things—and that’s what the staff was for.

“What do you mean, regular?” Ted asked.

You are so fucked, Zanne thought, but Mark blithely proceeded.

“Oh! Ha-ha. I mean your old pillows, the ones you were using already.” He gave Zanne a bemused look, as if Ted were a doddering old man who’d asked how The Twitter works.

“Are the regular pillows all the same?”

“No, yours are extra-long and synthetic, and Holly’s are standard-size goose down.”

Eject! Eject, you dummy, but Mark was still standing there grinning, so proud of his quote-unquote plan. The pathetic color coding. The half-baked communication. Rolling out the plan in the garage, on the fly.

“So, regular is relative to what?” Ted asked.

“Relative to this test.”

“Oh. This is a test? And what are we testing?” Ted’s voice turned playful, and Zanne thought of a cat torturing a mouse. Mark’s smile took on a strained quality as it finally—finally!—dawned on him that this wasn’t going well.

“We put out three pillows for now. We have more for you to try if you don’t like any of these, but we wanted to keep this super targeted. We’re hoping we can nail this in one round.”

“How did you determine which pillows I should start with?” Ted asked.

“The three we put out are the highest-rated.”

“According to...?”

“Consumer Reports,” Mark said, standing a little taller, a little prouder. To a certain kind of person, Consumer Reports stood for unvarnished, unbiased, nonpartisan appraisal. It was a fine place to start a research report for Ted, but not the be-all and end-all. Zanne had told Mark this. Why hadn’t he listened? Why had he pressed ahead when his work wasn’t ready? This exercise was quickly descending from embarrassing to painful.

“And Consumer Reports ranks the pillows according to price?” Ted asked.

“And comfort and hypoallergenic sensitivity.”

“But those variables aren’t important to me. My problem is with postural alignment. Were the pillows ranked according to that?”

“Not per se, but you can extrapolate.”

“How would you do that?”