Terms & Conditions by Robert Glancy

brilliant new technology; you should try it some time.
    PPS Sorry, that’s just my facetious way of saying –
Write to me, Frank! What the fuck’s going on in your life?

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF WHITE
    It’s not a colour – it’s a shade.
    When things were particularly bad between us, my wife decided we needed a fresh start. In her world this meant the two of us painting the flat together: a ‘bonding project’ she called it. Which meant replacing white with a slightly different shade of white. (It didn’t freshen the flat and it certainly didn’t help our relationship.) Instead of painting over the cracks, it merely highlighted them. Preposterous though it may sound, we actually spent – wasted! – two whole weeks deciding – arguing! – about what type of white to paint the already white flat.
    It was a big deal to my wife.
    At one point our argument got so intense, so out of control, that I shouted, ‘Do you love this flat more than you love me?’*
    * She paused just a beat too long.
    â€˜Oh, don’t be so dramatic,’ she said (but she still didn’t answer my question).
    We looked through lots of swatches and analysed all the different whites with their wonderful names. The Half Villa Whites, the Quarter Tea Whites, the Eighth Thornton, the Half Supernova.*
    * Like fantastic-sounding designer drugs, ‘
Can I have a tab of Supernova and a gram of Thornton White, please?
’
    I bought test pots and painted patches on different walls and I sat there staring at three types of identical white saying, ‘I can’t really see the difference,’ which made my wife shout, ‘You’re just colour blind, that’s your problem!’
    â€˜I don’t think white is technically a colour,’ I said. ‘It’s a shade.’
    â€˜You’re a fucking shade,’ she screamed.
    Yes, we actually argued over what white was the right white.
    Then, after weeks of deliberation, we finally decided on a white; we received the full pots, and a label on the bottom read,
Production batches may differ from the colour in the test pot
.*
    * What! How could that be? How could we spend two weeks deciding on an infinitesimal difference in colour spectrum only to be told at the end that the final colour may vary?
    When I told my wife about this in an incredulous voice, she accused me of not taking the
process
seriously enough.*
    * Sometimes she was more observant than she seemed.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF MY WIFE’S JOB
    Couriers lose hearts all the time.
    My wife profiles humans for a living.
    She writes psychometric tests to tell companies what people are like. Apparently we can’t tell any more. There was a time when we trusted our instincts. Now we pay people like my wife to slice instinct out of the whole flabby human equation.*
    * We’ve made a science of everything we’re too scared to do for ourselves.
    There’s something so sad about the process, about this human evaluation, that often I have to stop myself thinking about it as it makes me want to weep.
    My wife gets me to do the tests. I’m her guinea pig. I’ve no idea how I score on them and I don’t care. But she does. She’ll have a spreadsheet somewhere – she loves spreadsheets – or some graph with a swan-diving line indicating my devolution. I wonder when I started to fall from grace. I can’t pinpoint the moment I slipped from brilliant to average to ungradable, although I’m sure my wife could tell me down to the exact day.
    At university I was a straight-A student, wildly, effortlessly ambitious, incorrigibly intelligent. I loved tests; they made me feel as if I was accomplishing things. My wife met me when I was at the peak of my brilliance, destined for greatness. She picked a beauty in me, she really did. I couldn’t sustain it, of course. Brilliance is brittle. It’s such a clear and hard thing that when I