personal evolution

In the year 2000 I was hired by a university on the south side of Chicago to re-write their undergraduate admissions program. This consisted of four viewbooks (brochures) plus several supporting brochures and direct mail pieces. I was hired for $27,500. This was actually a bump up from my first job out of school... working TV/radio/outdoor media for $22,000. I was very pleased to be hired on at the university because I had been working towards getting a copywriter job since I'd decided that I wanted to write ads for a living while I was in college during the mid-90's.

I found the environment in the marketing department at the university to be extremely slow paced, yet highly volatile in its professional politics and frequent firings/hierarchy re-arrangements. So, basically, it was a shit job in a shit environment.

Writing a campaign for a university your first time out as a professional writer is a bigger, more stressful job than you can imagine. Its scope is literally enormous. To make matters worse, the three staff designers that I was working with on the project (and leaned on, learned from, followed) were fired once the basic design was approved by the admissions department. I was then handed a rolodex of freelance designers and told to start interviewing. I quickly chose a designer with an office close to the university and began to bust ass. I spent countless hours and fought countless headaches to keep the project on schedule. I had to hire and supervise photographers and photoshoots, work with the admissions people, keep everything on budget, and work with the egos who ran the business side as well as the academic side of the school. In hindsight, only my naivety and fear of losing my job kept the project on schedule, on budget and on task.

That summer I had broken up with a girlfriend I'd dated for a year, so I kind of needed to have something occupying my time. I was poor, I was blue and I was up to my neck in work and stress. It was a potent combination for kicking ass.

After all of the photos had been taken, the designs and copy approved and the printer chosen, I spent 36 hours catching a couple hours of sleep here and there while I was on press check for my campaign. See, when 100,000 copies of anything is being printed, they don't turn the printers off, they run until the job is complete. Printers print four to eight pages at a time, and when that run of 100,000 pieces is complete, they begin the next round, and it's my job to approve the sheet before they begin the real run. I have to approve the colors and have one last final chance to change any copy before a potential grammatical error is permanent. Thus, every four hours for 36 hours I was at the printer approving press checks. It was insanity.

When the viewbooks were delivered everyone was very pleased with them. For a period of time I had total respect as the marketing guy from several of the higher ups plus academics that I'd gotten to know while working on the project. An old man who'd retired from my department named Jerry congratulated me for finishing the project. Apparently nothing ever really gets done at the school and everyone thought it was a BS dream that the in-house marketing department could complete the job. The directors of the department were kind of stupid... they hired a kid (me) with no real experience and no real portfolio to write their campaign, and I did it. A year later admissions recorded a 23% increase in the size of their freshman class. Being that 1/3 of the students were foreign, it was a highly difficult school to be accepted into, and it was literally across the street from highly violent Chicago housing projects, the viewbooks I wrote must be credited with a good deal of this increase.

Later that year, amongst the upheaval of the directors, a new director - John - was hired to run admissions. John is a fat, balding, middle aged asshole. He made it very clear immediately that he was an expert at print marketing (he quickly proved to not know shit) and that he was in charge. He let me know that he thought I was a kid and that I didn't know what I was doing, that I was lucky. He'd come from another Chicago university where he had ruled. He was a micro-manager. He brought with him an ad agency whom he'd worked with for several years and a printer who turned out to be his brother in law.

I could see the writing on the wall... my department and my job were going to be eventually edged out. I brought this up to my department and got nowhere. Sitting in my director Dorothy's office and reporting her the rundown of events and where it was headed turned into a total waste of my time. Midway through my discussion she took a picture of me with her palm pilot digital camera and said "we should get one of these for all of the admissions counselors for their college fairs!" It was obvious to me that she wasn't listening, didn't care and was a fucking idiot. She didn't make the connection that admissions was one of the department's largest and most high profile accounts, and that losing it may also mean that she may eventually lose her job (which she eventually did). Total fucking idiot!

As time passed, John made sure to be as much of an asshole as he could possibly be. It was his intent to break me, to get me to quit. I looked for another job on the side, but it was the fourth quarter of 2002 and the economy was shit. I stubbornly challenged John on everything: the success of my viewbooks meant that there was no need to pay this outside ad agency the $85,000 they'd already racked up in meetings, travel and bullshit design work. I knew for fact that admissions had only budgeted $35,000 for the year. I felt I'd earn the right to an opinion... especially to some jerkoff who was blazing through way too much money and had just walked into a success story. John's brother in law the printer had had a scam going on at John's last college where the printer had recieved a permanent no-bid contract to print everything. Given the volume of direct mail and print pieces, this equals several hundred thousand dollars a year. It was just shady. It seemed obvious (to me anyways) that John and the printer were fleecing the school(s) with their arrangement. I tried to communicate this with my bosses, as well as a couple higher ups. It got me nowhere.

At 6'3" 200 lbs with a lean athletic build, I suppose that I was a bit of an intimidating presence to the short, fat, middle-aged John. At heart John is a coward. He spent the better part of the fall of 2002 slipping out of a room that I'd enter and generally weasling away from me. This is because John is a pussy. He gotten to where he's gotten by backstabbing, cheating and fucking people over.

Two weeks before Christmas 2002 I was called in by the communications VP and told that my position was being eliminated effective immediately. I was stunned, but not totally suprised. I went back to my desk, explained what had happened to my colleagues, grabbed a couple items and got the fuck out of there. I recieved a two week severence.

I eventually had to hassle with the university to get them to cut me a check for the 70 hours of vacation time I'd racked up. This consisted of me going to the financial office in my black sweatshirt, black running pants and black stocking hat and walking one moron from one office, to another moron signing something in another office, to walking with another moron to an account office and getting that moron to cut me a check. What the fuck? I had nothing but time on my hands, and the 5 o'clock shadow and nearly disgruntled look on my face ensured that I was getting paid. Today.

I was out of work for the next eight months. I got by with random temp jobs, unemployment checks and delivering subs (occasionally to people I went to college with). I found that I was usually tipped very well. I figured it was because they were suprised to see a white person delivering subs, and assumed that I needed it.

Eventually I got another writing job and have been here for a year. Somethings piss me off, but I've grown thick skin concerning self bloated egos and the whatnot. I silently understand that there aren't many real men in the office environment, and that I am capable of enduring a great deal of shit that may break others. I can out-wit, out-drink, out-fight, out-fuck and out-last many of the "men" I must deal with daily.

I write this today because I ran into and grabbed lunch with an old co-worker, and we caught up. I ran a google search on John and found that he had recently taken a position with a noteable university in St. Louis... a true step up. His entrance bio stated that during his two and a half years at the school in Chicago, he'd inceased first year enrollment by a staggering 57%. Pure genius. I'll assume that John needed to find a new job - he'd surely pissed off at least a couple of the wrong people - and even though I recall that he had junior high school aged kids a couple years back, he'd probably fucked too many people over in Chicago and was forced to relocate.

He is someone that I can honestly say deserves whatever happens to him. Karma has a way of circling back and fucking you up if you've been bad (I've caught it,.. it's a bitch). John will one day catch his.

In the end I received what I considered to be good news a year after my lay off: the ad agency hired (with the staff of 4 copywriters) only changed the design of the viewbooks and didn't change any of the copy I'd written because the copy worked. It was a success. It was my first success. When I was in college and decided that I wanted to be a copywriter, I'd set a goal to write something that people all over the country would read or see, by the time I turned 30. Working on this university admissions campaign, I wrote and produced a body of work that was distributed throughout North America, Europe, the Middle East,.. the world. And I did it by the time I'd turned 27. This is an accomplishment that I'm very proud of, and something that I feel is worth all of the bullshit and all of the assholes that I've had to deal with to get where I am, and evolved into who I've become.

Lessons learned:

1. fight for your principles
2. stand up for yourself
3. don't fuck with people
4. don't be a pussy
5. be a man
6. always kick maximum ass