Friday, September 12, 2014

Friday meanderings.

I am running a little late this morning. Shame on me.

Since I got on the bus about 15 minutes later than usual, it took about 30 minutes longer than usual for me to make the trek from Manhattan's far east side to Manhattan's far west side. The fact is, the only mode of transportation slower than the M31 bus is a caravan of three-legged camels stumbling across the Sahara in a full-on sand-storm.

 I guess I'm feeling a little under it lately, and a little black-doggy. What's more, yesterday I presented a 17-page copy deck and that was no great joy. It went well, but I'm not cut out to talk that long, especially on the phone when you can't see if your "audience" is rolling their eyes, playing solitaire or vomiting in a waste-basket.

That said, it all went well, and the few changes they recommended will surely be done by one today as I promised them.

The longest copy I ever presented was to a recent client of mine who wanted a brand book that defined who they were and showed some pictures of their smiling faces. I wrote 64-pages of copy. It took almost a year to get it approved and printed. Probably longer than it took to write the Torah or Gilgamesh or Don Quixote.

I don't know why everything in advertising has gotten as slow and unproductive as the M31 bus. Maybe our business processes in some corrupt permutation of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny has come to resemble Congress. We can't get anything done. We can't get anything approved. Everything is stymied and stifled. And there's certainly no place to actually be bold.

Well, as John Wilkes Booth and Suetonius, alea iacta est, the die is cast, the copy is done, the revisions will soon be on their way.

Oh, and it's Friday.

We made it, or nearly so, through another one.



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