Field Notes: Seventeen Beige Mood Rings

On a Thursday in early January, four members of the product team convened in the second-floor conference room for what was described, on the calendar, as an "internal validation exercise." The objective: to wear seventeen Beige Mood Rings simultaneously, across all available fingers of the available hands, and to observe what happened. Nothing happened.

We had, I suppose, expected nothing to happen. The product is calibrated to an emotional output of beige, and at no point in the development process has it done otherwise. Still, there is a question one has, quietly, when one works on a device like this, and the question is whether enough of the devices, worn at once, might collectively produce some minor deviation from the calibration. They do not.

The four of us wore the rings for ninety minutes. At one point, a colleague consumed a cup of hot tea and then a glass of cold water in rapid succession, on the theory that physiological thermal shock might nudge the stones toward some unintended hue. The stones remained beige. At another point, we watched a short clip of a dog returning to its owner after a lengthy absence, on the theory that involuntary emotional response might do what physiological shock had not. The stones remained beige.

At the end of the session, we removed the rings, returned them to their boxes, and went back to our desks. My colleague Paxton remarked, on the way out, that it had been a more restful ninety minutes than he had scheduled any other ninety minutes this month. I am inclined to agree.

The Beige Mood Ring is, in my view, performing as described. This should not have been a question. It was, briefly, a question. It is no longer.