As I write this, it's nominally George Washington's birthday, you know, the father of our country.
In amerika, we haven't for about fifty years, celebrated most holidays on the days they were intended to be celebrated. We've shifted holidays around so we can enjoy three-day weekends.
When I was a boy, there was a little sketch of Lincoln on the calendar square marked February 12th, his birthday. There was a Washington figure just ten days later on February 22nd. We took both days off, ostensibly to honor important amerikans.
These days, only a few holidays have stayed in place. Like Christmas, the 4th of July, and New Year's. But many more have lost their original meaning in a flurry of barbecues, mattress sales, and time off from work.
I've always been against time shifting, believing that we should actually think about the things that make a country a country, not just beer and a day off. But that integrity was lost long ago. How long, I wonder, until we start holding "Martin Luther King 'I Have a Dream' mattress sales?"
There's a bigger point here, I think. And it somehow has to do with efficiency.
As a MBA-sullied culture, we are always looking for efficiencies. How can we do task A with few steps, quicker, so we can get more done for less money? With a grain of salt, that's essentially the operating principle of everything today no matter what. From dating, to divorce. From manufacturing, to creation. From hiring to firing.
How can we do it cheaper and faster?
[By the way, if doing everything cheaper and faster is your modus operandi, eventually everything is cheap and fast. And so fast that it's no longer cheap (because you have to do it over again) and so cheap that it's no longer fast (because you have to do it many times.]
You might now consider Terry Pratchett's "Boots Theory," above. It might take a little cogitation to make it fit here, but I think it might.
The expedience of convenience--I'll say it absolutely--has destroyed the advertising industry.
Because while you can efficiency-ize making brass screws or bolts, or even a clock, you can't efficiency-ize having an idea.
Clients and agencies rush and do it cheaply and badly, and so have to do it every few months as their business and people flee the premises. I wonder if anyone involved in the Omni-IPG merger can read.
What's more, "Just in Time" manufacturing might work for an assembly line. But it doesn't work for human resources. Today, every agency is 88-percent staffed by freelancers, hired at a peak of frenzy and fired at the first sign of frenzy-abatement.
A friend of mine works as a freelancer. He's always booked and always unbooked at the same time. It doesn't matter what the workload, the only thing that matters is the margin.
I dunno, somehow managing to margin not quality or even efficacy seems a product of the same thinking that moves holidays around, tosses away their social-glue meaning, and thinks it's all ok because it's good for business.
The thing is expedience is rarely good for business. Actually, it's rarely good for anything. As above, you'll wind up with wet feet, maybe pneumonia and maybe in a hospital, with no health-care coverage because it's more expedient to just deny coverage to all for the benefit of the few.
One thing I've learned along the way is that there are no shortcuts. I'm about the fastest creative you'll ever meet, but not because I do things slap-dash, but because I never stop working and thinking about what needs to be done. There are times, of course, I feel like phoning it in. Everybody feels that way now and again.
As a human, as an agency, as a husband, a father, a friend, I provide, as above, $50 boots.
Yeah, paying me sucks.
But not as bad as not paying me.
