Illuminations

The worst part about being a cynic is being right all the time. Eventually.

While I myself have escaped the knife for now, what amounts to 1/3^rd of my agency’s staff will be let go today. As in laid-off. AKA fired.

We Lucky Few who remain do so at the pleasure of the King; at least for as long the King can still make payroll.

There is practically no such thing as a “new client” in times like these and every client on the existing roster has slashed their ad budget to the brittle bone. And here, as in most other businesses everywhere, more resources than human will be cut in parallel with client spending. Like trimming the office square-footage and reducing any hope of seeing that annual bonus to the laughable fantasy I already knew it was (and probably even dropping the number of pencils we can keep in our desktop coffee cups).

Oh God. Coffee. I wonder if we’ll still have coffee. The free candy and Nature Valley bars over the office ‘fridge are surely done for, and that stuff amounted to at least half of my weekday caloric intake.

This sucks.

What especially sucks is knowing that these people are dead before they know it. The boss and We Lucky Few had our dour, closed-door chat before lunch. It is now lunch. He will be doing the hard part when he gets back from lunch.

Tick, tick, tick…

Now he’s back from lunch.

And now I want to get the fuck outta’ here before these highly pressurized vibes give me a nosebleed.

My stomach has known something very much like this was going to happen for several weeks. And now that the rest of me has been forced to see my stomachs’ side of things at least I can prove my visceral paranoia is not of the delusional variety. Perhaps sadly, it never is.

Now it’s 4:30PM, that time of the work day—especially of a Black Friday—that just doesn’t know when to leave. As a [remaining] coworker just said, right now this place “feels like Detroit.”

Couldn’t have put it better. Won’t even try.

If there’s a next victim in this blood opera I’m it. They want me to stay, in fact I was asked to stay in spite of the stern realities as if I could find a better berth with a wave of my hand. If only. I bluntly asked if they could afford me and was assured that “after these cuts” everything will be back on keel. But the truth is that, for this little shop, I’m a big luxury. More of what they want than, come to brass tacks, what they need. So we’ll see. We always see.

From the very beginning of my career I was warned that advertising is not an industry that cares for its old. But that’s not something most of us think too hard on while we’re rocketing skyward in our so-called “peak earning years” and our capo di tutti i capi is an 86 year-old Englishman given to maintaining a tree-martini glow while paying a bagpiper to follow him around the office.

“I’m gonna’ be that guy one day” I would say.

Well, I mastered the drunk part anyway.

So tonight, as soon as I am free of this temporarily toxic environment, I will raise my glass (ok, my can) to those lost today, here and elsewhere, trusting that they would do the same for me and hoping they won’t have to anytime soon.

Fasten your helmet straps, kiddies. It’s going to one hell of a year. Trust me on that. Because don’t you know?

I’m right.

I’m right all the time.

Eventually.