There was once a show called Better Off Ted. It was one of those overly cerebral, biting social commentary comedies mocking corporate America. It was too smart for its own good and got cancelled after one season. In episode 4, “Racial Insensitivity”, the company decides to mitigate its environmental impact and save energy by installing motion sensors in all its offices. Lights only turn on when someone enters a room. Water fountains only work when someone is in close proximity. Doors open on motion sensors, and so forth. The problem is, the motion sensors work by recognizing light reflected off the skin, and so they do not see black people. A corporate oversight, surely.

The problem now is that that the company cannot simply scrap the entire system, because it is committed to environmental health and saving energy. So instead, the company hires white people to follow its black employees so that doors can open for them and lights can turn on. But this creates another major problem. The company now has an overrepresentation of whites in its work force, due to all of the additional white people hired to follow the black people. And so, their solution, in order to achieve a higher corporate social responsibility score, is to hire still more black people to follow the white people who follow the black people, after which they have to hire still more white people to follow the black people that are following the white people who follow the black people.

By the end of the episode, the company concludes:

“If the company keeps hiring white people to follow black people to follow white people to follow black people, then by Thursday, June 27th 2013, every person on Earth will be working for us. And we don’t have the parking for that.”