My Retirement Party.

The great Dave Trott, an English ad person who’s done some of my favorite commercials and ads ever, including what I consider the best beer commercials ever done, often talks about getting upstream to answer a creative problem.

To be honest, I never really understood what “upstream” meant. Maybe that’s the New Yorker in me. I prefer to think about heading someone off at the pass, beating someone to the punch, or schtupping them before they schtup you.

In the words of Terry Malloy, “do it to him, before he does it to you."

Whether or not those terms are synonymous, my guess is you get the point.

Some years ago, about a year before I was actually shit-canned from Ogilvy for having a grown-up’s salary and grown-up grey hair and running grown-up pieces of business, I had a sense that I was going to be fired.

There was an obituary in the New York Times over the weekend of a guy called Frank Smith who died at the age of 101. In 1951, Smith was sentenced to death for murdering a night-watchman.

"On June 7, 1954, two hours before he was to be strapped into the chair, the state’s Board of Pardons and Paroles commuted his death sentence" to life-imprisonment. Still, "even decades later, he remained haunted by the electric chair — 'still an object of primal, almost talismanic fear,' Annalisa Quinn wrote in a 2023 profile in The Boston Globe Magazine. ‘It cooks you,’ he would repeat, folding into himself. ‘It cooks you.’”

That fear of being cooked is a little what it’s like being over 40, or even 35, in an ad agency today. You can hear the hobnail-booted guards walking down the concrete death-row flooring coming to get you. Only in agencies, it’s HR-functionaries probably in rent-a-runway shoes tip-toeing on carpet tiles. Stained carpet tiles.

In any event, in my mind I was convinced the executioners were coming for me. I hadn’t done anything bad. I was in demand by account teams, other creatives and clients. It’s just that, as I said, I had somehow gotten old, experienced and expensive. Everything that used to be a hallmark of quality now instead put a mark on your head.

So, I decided to “get upstream of the problem.”

I went on ebay and found a 30-pack of retirement greeting cards for just $7. I didn’t feel like spending $7.98 for a single card, even one as adroit as this:

Next, I pulled together about half a dozen friends and co-workers and asked them each to sign five or six cards. Each with different color inks and with different names. In short order, I had 30 going away cards that looked as much like the real thing as crypto looks like real money. Or fast food looks edible.

Finally, I strung some string about my work area as if the string were festive streamers and I hung the various retirement cards up as if my friends had held a retirement party for me and the cards on display were how they decorated.

My upstreamness was very simple.

I pictured two HR people marching down to my workspace in their HR-goose-stepping style. I knew they’d be ready to say, “can we see you for a minute?” Though that’s technically a question, it’s not really anything but an execution. 

These days corporate cruelty is nominally tempered by excel spreadsheet’s worth of politesse, so as to make the cruelty even crueler, like pulling the wings off a fly. (Often people misspell crueler as cruller. You might think they're talking about donuts. I’m not.)

I pictured the HR people unable to find me at my table. But noticing the retirement cards everywhere, I imagined they breathed a sigh of relief. I could suddenly see them high-tailing it back to their well-hidden bosses and saying, “we don’t have to fire George. We just went down to do it and there were retirement cards everywhere. He’s retiring soon and just hasn’t given his notice.”

The HR-director would then come out from under his desk, take a deep gulp of office-regurgitated meeting-air and rejoice, “Think of the severance we’ll save!”

I’m not sure if my little ruse worked at all.

I’m not sure if they ever came down in person to fire me.

I do know I lasted about nine-months longer than I thought I would. 

I wonder if I could win an award for this.

At least some version of a Effie.

An F.U.