In the last installment of The Biz, I told you origin stories about my life in the New York ad agency world, including phone stabbings, death threats, and furniture throwing. That was just the start of my eccentric co-workers from whom I learned anger management, or lack thereof. Here's a few more stories to finish off the "To Be Continued..." I left you with last time.
If I were forced to choose, I would say that copywriters are the wildest of all of the creative people. I one had a kid named Andy Pillarsky working for me when I was at XYZ Advertising*. He was the greatest flake I every worked with. He was high on everything in the world, you name it—pills, marijuana, plastic model glue—only God knows what else. He arrived to the office nearly catatonic. It got to the point where if I looked into his dilated pupils another time I would literally lose my mind. I mean, he was the embodiment of the burned-out agency guy. Burned out on life, not the ad biz because he was always clutch when the client needed great copy. And, he was great, so I never wrote him up or sent him away.
The material issue with Andy was not the state that he arrived in, but when he arrived. Some days he would show up at five in the evening. He used to tell me that he had vampire tendencies in a former life and it spilled over into this life. He was terrified of mornings. He hated mornings, so he would hide in bed until the sun started to dip into the distance. It wasn’t that he was dodging work—he used to work until the wee hours of the morning—it was simply that he was working a different schedule which wreaked havoc with our traffic manager’s anal scale of scheduling grids and what-not.
They get through the brainstorming session, and the next item on the agenda is a tour of the manufacturing plant. You can’t get out of Wilson & Wilson without this tour. It’s your get out of jail free card. So, with the Big Cheese leading the way, they meander through the factory and the group stops at this extremely bizarre, very strange-looking object. The Big Cheese proudly explains that this is an artificial vagina, in fact its name is the testgina, and naturally it verifies how good Snoogles are. The New York folks are looking at these testginas and they’re biting through their tongues to keep from laughing. The Big Cheese keeps going on about how good these testginas are and finally one New Yorker says, “And if you’re real nice, they let you take the testgina to dinner.” That triggered the account people collapsing on the factory floor in roaring laughter, the president turning angry red, and the advertising manager paralyzed with fear.
Needless to say, we didn’t win the business.
I once worked for a vice president of an agency whom we called “Schelp-Rock.” Schelp-Rock always managed to sit through a presentation and mess it all up at the end. He had this dreadful tendency to insult the client and he was truly dangerous to have around. We used to take bets on when he would open his mouth and blow the pitch. We kept telling him, ”Please stay away from presentations if you can’t stop insulting people.” Schelp-Rock would respond, “I’m going to behave, I’m really going to let you all do what you do best.”
One day we were pitching for a tourism department of some Middle Eastern country and the bagman for the dictator shows up to hear our pitch. The idea was if you got your pitch past the bagman, then you got to pitch to the top guy himself. The pitch went on for an eternity, something like four hours, and Schelp-Rock was a wunderkind. He sat there, not saying a word, and I was beginning to feel sorry about the way we yelled at him. “He’s great,” I said to myself, “he’s behaving like a real giant of industry. I’m sorry we hazed him before the meeting about his performance.”
For three hours and 57 minutes hours he was perfect. The meeting ends and I say to myself, “Thank goodness, we made it, the pitch is over and he hasn’t blown it, he hasn’t insulted the guys, he hasn’t done anything wrong.” So Schelp-Rock puts his arm around the bagman and as they were walking out the door—out the door mind you—Schelp-Rock says, “Mahmoud, you’re a nice guy. We’re going to be working together, I’m sure, and you’ll see we’re nice people, too. If you keep up the niceness, maybe we’ll give you back Israel.” I knew right then and there we were cooked.
....To Be Continued...
*-Names are changed to protect the guilty.
The material issue with Andy was not the state that he arrived in, but when he arrived. Some days he would show up at five in the evening. He used to tell me that he had vampire tendencies in a former life and it spilled over into this life. He was terrified of mornings. He hated mornings, so he would hide in bed until the sun started to dip into the distance. It wasn’t that he was dodging work—he used to work until the wee hours of the morning—it was simply that he was working a different schedule which wreaked havoc with our traffic manager’s anal scale of scheduling grids and what-not.
His problems, our problems, extended far past rudimentary project management. Creative directors frequently couldn’t find him, because of course, he was still in bed. Account managers were constantly trying to pin him down for their copy only to see an empty desk. And there he was, sleepwalking to his desk at four or five in the evening, more likely than not in Zombie Mode. It’s a fairly well known fact that account guys have never understood how to handle creative that are high as a kite. And then other copywriters saw Andy and his schedule and wanting part of the flexible work hours action so they too could sleep in the morning.
I was always staying late to counsel him, “Andy, you’ve have get here earlier earlier. Everyone is looking for you during the day, you know that, don’t you?” Andy would always say something along these lines, “I can’t help it. I’ll do anything else you want, but I can’t help it. These vampire lives overwhelm me. I have to come in at this time.” I said, “Andy, listen, I can’t protect you forever. The bosses are going to get wind of it eventually and they are going to can you.” Yet, he wouldn’t listen.
They finally decided to fire him because he was causing too much anxiety for the rest of the team. The day I was told to let him go, he comes into my office at 8:30 A.M. and says, “Chief, “I figured out how to get in early. I want a raise.”
This caught me off guard to say the least, so I asked him what he meant and the conversation went something like this:
Andy: “I’ve found a new girlfriend and I need that raise so that she can leave her apartment and move into a better one with her. Not only is she a vampire hunter who can cure me, but after we move in together, she’ll wake me up early because she isn’t scared of the morning like I am and then I’ll be able to get into work on time. I won’t oversleep.”
Me: “Andy, you need more money from the agency so you and your girlfriend can move in and she can get you up in the morning, right?”
Andy: “Exactly!”
Me: “Andy, did you ever hear of an alarm clock?”
Andy: “Did you ever try to fuck an alarm clock?”
Andy went from XYZ Advertising to several other agencies where he did respectable work, but he always managed to get fired. Now he’s retired in Colorado where it’s legal to get high. He’s been fired from some of the best agencies in town. One director fired him Vito Corleone style. He went to the fish market and bought a huge tuna, wrapped it in newspaper and put it on Andy’s desk. That told Andy that he was done there.
Most copywriters are suspicious. Andy felt that people and things were always snubbing him. Take the copier. Everybody was coming up to the copier at XYZ Advertising and making copies. But when Andy put his piece of paper into the copier, there were some strange noises and the original came out of the machine all smudged and torn. He took it out of the machine, looked up, and screamed in his monotone voice, “Even the Xerox hates me.”
There’s another copywriter named Sarah*—extremely nice lady, quiet, well-mannered, education, except that she had a thing about suing people. Typically, she was suing two or three people at a time (I swear). It was a known fact in the business that if you hire Sarah, you know she is going to spend most of her time in court. She simply loved to be the victim, sue people, and spend time with the lawyers. For example, what she used to do is walk down the street and wait at the bus stop for a bus. Imagine the bus stopping two feet from the curb and she has to walk through a puddle to board. The first thing she says to the driver is, “What is this, you stopping so far from the curb?” Bus drivers, who deal with crazies all day long will tell her to move her ass to the rear of the bus, and naturally, the next day she knocks out a letter to the government agency running the busses letting them them they’re being sued for whatever crazy reason Sarah dreams up.
When she was working at XYZ advertising she once took on one of the big airline carriers after a lousy flight. One of her side jobs is weekend stock racing and the lousy (and late) flight caused her to miss the race. So she wrote the airlines that she was planning to sue. She got a couple of mid-level pencil pushers to call as a result of that letter. They called her up and said, “How can we settle this issue?” Sarah said, “I think the only way you can settle it is in my office. Why don’t you try to be here at eleven-thirty in the morning?”
It happened that I needed the conference room that day and when I arrived, I saw Sarah sitting and talking with two very well-dressed men who looked as disturbed as possible. She was dictating something and our marketing coordinator was also there taking notes. I had no idea what was going on, so I spotted our traffic manager outside the conference room and told her I needed the room for a client meeting. She told me that Sarah had been in there for a long time and there’s no sign of it breaking up. I wound up meeting my client in my not-media-ready office.
Later on, I asked Sarah which client he was meeting with in the conference room. She said, “No, that wasn’t a client. Those were some guys from airlines and I was dictating my terms to them. I think they’re going to accept so I probably won’t sue.” I said, “You mean you took agency time as well as the conference room?” Sarah said, “Well, Michael, it’s very important to me that this thing gets straightened out.”
We fired her the next day. She never sued us, or me.
All the wackiness doesn’t stay on the creative side. On the account side, which is the direct link between the agency and the client, has its share of insanity. The big disparity is that the creative side takes advantage of its so-called creative reputation, and creative can where t-shirts under cardigans, and wear see-through shirts and ripped pants and dilate their pupils. The account side has to stay straight and narrow and wear Stella McCartney or Hugo Boss and stay sober.
The pressure sometimes gets to the account guys, however, and when they wig out it’s something to behold. I know a horde of account people who once had to make a trip to Cincinnati, to visit the folks who run a division of Wilson & Wilson*. That division happens to be prominent in the menstrual business: they make a little item called Snoogles*. So here is this group of New York agency account people winging it in Midwest, spending the morning talking about the advertising plans of Snoogles before going out to lunch.
Turns out the account folks load up a bit too much on the Midwestern martinis. Back from lunch, the big cheese from the division says he wants everyone around the table to brainstorm about other uses for Snoogles. You know, develop new business, investigate new markets, conquer new horizons, that sort of thing. The guys from New York are sitting there in a haze and one of the account women pipes up, “Hey, how about using Snoogles as torches for dwarfs?” When you’re living in Midwest and you get fired by this particular corporate giant, there’s not many companies where you can land safely. So the tendency is to downplay the smart-ass cracks about Snoogles. The New York guys all break up at the idea of dwarfs using Snoogles as torches, but the Wilson & Wilson big cheese is not impressed and everybody shuts up.
Needless to say, we didn’t win the business.
I once worked for a vice president of an agency whom we called “Schelp-Rock.” Schelp-Rock always managed to sit through a presentation and mess it all up at the end. He had this dreadful tendency to insult the client and he was truly dangerous to have around. We used to take bets on when he would open his mouth and blow the pitch. We kept telling him, ”Please stay away from presentations if you can’t stop insulting people.” Schelp-Rock would respond, “I’m going to behave, I’m really going to let you all do what you do best.”
One day we were pitching for a tourism department of some Middle Eastern country and the bagman for the dictator shows up to hear our pitch. The idea was if you got your pitch past the bagman, then you got to pitch to the top guy himself. The pitch went on for an eternity, something like four hours, and Schelp-Rock was a wunderkind. He sat there, not saying a word, and I was beginning to feel sorry about the way we yelled at him. “He’s great,” I said to myself, “he’s behaving like a real giant of industry. I’m sorry we hazed him before the meeting about his performance.”
For three hours and 57 minutes hours he was perfect. The meeting ends and I say to myself, “Thank goodness, we made it, the pitch is over and he hasn’t blown it, he hasn’t insulted the guys, he hasn’t done anything wrong.” So Schelp-Rock puts his arm around the bagman and as they were walking out the door—out the door mind you—Schelp-Rock says, “Mahmoud, you’re a nice guy. We’re going to be working together, I’m sure, and you’ll see we’re nice people, too. If you keep up the niceness, maybe we’ll give you back Israel.” I knew right then and there we were cooked.
....To Be Continued...
*-Names are changed to protect the guilty.