One-Sentence Story: The M&M Man

Glassed Candy by Wayne Thiebaud

When the company was still very small, John, the VP of Engineering, had a special M&M dispenser on his desk, a red M&M man with his big white shoes and his white-gloved hands—

pull the upraised hand down and—ca-ching!— candy spilled out—

and everyone in the office ate that candy except for me—

we worked so hard then, with such intensity, never forgetting how the company would only survive if our new product—the software we were creating—was not only outstanding but we also met all our deadlines before the money ran out, and you could tell that the stress level was going up and up because the ca-ching! sound echoed in the halls more and more frequently—

because, as I told everyone, “I’ve never had even one. I know that if I get started, I’ll get addicted, and I’ll never be able to stop,” but all that was when we were still an idealistic startup company—

before we went public and my boss, Michael, became an unhappy millionaire whose wife left him, and before our sales fell and the VP of Sales was fired and the stock went crashing down and the CFO left, and before I realized that I had never belonged there and that all those engineers—all those men I had worked with for so many years and spent more waking hours with than I did with my own family—would never really be my friends—

and by the time I quit and left the software industry for good, although the M&M man was still standing on John’s desk, it was always empty, and I thought about buying John a big bag of M&Ms to give him on my last day, but I never got around to it.


by Nina Zolotow

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