by David Thorne
I’d registered as a business by then, moved from the home office into a real office with a sign on the door and employed a third person - a young Chinese woman named Huang - to do payroll and accounts. I say ‘young’ but none of us could work out her age - Asian women look 16 until they hit 50, at which point they immediately jump to 105. Whenever anyone asked Huang her age, she’d reply, “How old you think I am?” and then when you took a polite guess, she’d state, “You stupid” which never answered the question. She probably thought she was being all ‘mystery of the Orient’ or something. We’d advertised the position and received a few written applications but Huang had just showed up at the office with an abacus.
“You test me.”
“That won’t be necessary, this is just an informal cha...”
“You test me.”
“Right, okay, what’s 97 times 18?”
...cht, cht, cht...
“1,746.”
“Is she correct, Frank?”
“I don’t know, I don’t do math.”
“I correct every time. You gave me test for children. Give me harder test.”
“Well, there’s not really much point as we don’t know if you’re getting them right.”
“I right every time. Give me harder test.”
“Fine, what’s 95,000,000 divided by 267,303?”
“That stupid. You no have 95,000,000 dollars. I start today.”
“We actually have a few people to see but...”
“Nobody else want to work here. It stink. You smoke in office?”
“Er, Frank and I do sometimes but...”
“I start today.”
“We haven’t even discussed pay.”
“500 dollars a week. Cash.”
“Frank, how much does that work out to per year?”
“That’s 500 times 52 so... wait, is there 52 weeks in a year or is that how many cards are in a pack?”
“Yola, how much does that work out to per year?”
“It’s 2K per month so that’s 24K... which is actually very reasonable.”
“That can’t be right. There’s more than four weeks in a month. Except February. The other months have four weeks plus a couple of days. Maybe three. What’s 12 months divided by 52 weeks?”
“What?”
“See? This is why we need someone to do our accounts.”
“I start today. Tomorrow I bring pohpia.”
“Who’s that?”
“No who. Spring rolls.”
“Okay.”
Most men have a thing for Asian women (not Asian porn though, nobody wants to hear that dreadful “eeh-eeh-eeh” noise all the way through the video), but Huang wasn’t the type of Asian anyone has anything for; she was short and round and her teeth looked like fat porcupine quills. She also turned out to be quite mean - yelling and calling us stupid - but she was good at her job and had imported all of our accounts into software that was written in Mandarin within the first week so there wasn’t much we could do about it even if we wanted to.
Amcor grew, which meant our workload grew. I took on a fourth employee, Justin, to cope. Justin was Yola’s younger brother and everyone suspected he might have slight Down syndrome. I’m not sure if you can have slight Down syndrome, or if it’s a black and white thing where you either have it or you don’t, but I’ve seen people with Down syndrome bagging groceries in supermarkets and people with Down syndrome that can’t do much of anything except smile and eat ice cream. The ones with ice creams usually have really thick glasses. There’s obviously a scale of capability with people who don’t have Down syndrome - some are intelligent, educated and articulate functioning members of society, some are in the middle, and some voted for Trump - so perhaps Justin was just at the intelligent, educated and articulate end of the Down syndrome scale which made it hard to tell. If I’d been born with Down syndrome I’d be the kind that gets shown on the news playing a game of junior baseball for a local team and one of the kids would say, “We don’t even think of him as different, he’s just a member of the team.” Then they’d show me hitting a ball thrown softly underarm and everyone would cheer as I ran the wrong way and shit myself. At the end of the news segment, I’d be lifted onto the shoulders of my teammates, beaming and pumping the air with a fist, possibly while holding an ice cream, and the reporter would say something about the power of friendship. Coincidentally, it’s also difficult to tell the age of people with Down syndrome; they all look like 50-year-old men, even the women. I think part of the problem is that they don’t use hair product.
Regardless, Justin’s scale of capability in no way affected his ability to put together proofs. Quite the opposite in fact; Justin was like a machine, averaging five proofs an hour and pausing only to smile and wave when someone walked past his desk. With his first pay, he purchased 75 boxes of white Christmas lights and strung them from the office ceiling.
“What the fuck is this?”
“Christmas lights.”
“It’s June.”
“I like them.”
“It’s like the patio of a Mexican cantina in here. All we need is a Mariachi band and an old man trying to convince us to buy cellophane wrapped roses for our señoritas. Our power bill is going to triple.”
“Do you want me to take them down?”
“No, I suppose not. I kind of like them, too.”
“Can I put up more?”
“No.”
Frank wore sunglasses for two days to prove a point so we ended up buying dimmers. A few months later one of the dimmers caught fire - possibly from having enough current running through it to kick-start a fusion reactor - but Huang put it out with a large ceramic pot of water-lily and shiitake mushroom soup.
Apart from the odd fire and extreme power bills, we did actually have an art department that ‘ran like clockwork’. Maybe not Swiss-made clockwork but a decent Japanese movement. There were the usual petty arguments of course, Yola put Frank in a headlock until he passed out once and Huang quit about three-hundred times... but not once in three years had we failed to complete our proof quota for the day. Sure we only had one client, which meant all our eggs were in one basket, but it was a pretty big basket...
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From: Jason Pritchett
Date: Tuesday 15 May 2001 12.37pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Proof delivery
Dear Mr. Thorne,
My name is Jason Pritchett. I took over Tony Cox’s position as regional manager in March.
Part of my role at Amcor is to reduce production costs and one of the areas we have been looking at is the outsourcing of design. Our New Zealand branch began trialing a Malaysian agency for all electronic proof delivery in February and have been pleased with both the results and a 70% cost savings.
In an effort to coordinate all outsourced work through our new production department in Melbourne, Amcor will be contracting all production of proofs to the Malaysian agency exclusively. This is effective immediately. Please complete any outstanding Amcor work you may have and return within the next 7 days. Please also note than any electronic files pertaining to Amcor remain the property of such and should also be returned.
We thank you for the work you have provided Amcor over the last few years and wish you and your agency all the best.
Should you have any future packaging requirements, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Yours, Jason Pritchett
................................................................................................
From: David Thorne
Date: Tuesday 15 May 2001 12.56pm
To: Jason Pritchett
Subject: Re: Proof delivery
Dear Jason,
I received your email. Congratulations on the promotion to regional manager. And on managing to save Amcor seventy-percent on the cost of proof design and delivery.
I obviously can’t compete with Malaysian pricing - not without cutting m
y employees wages to a bowl of rice per day and instigating beatings - but a little more notice would have been appreciated.
I’m not sure what to tell my four staff members so I might just pile them into a van, drive out into the forest, and leave them there to fend for themselves.
Regards, David
................................................................................................
From: Jason Pritchett
Date: Tuesday 15 May 2001 2.44pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Proof delivery
We’re not under any legal obligation to give you any notice. Amcor is a global company and our suppliers need to compete on a global level. All the best.
Jason
................................................................................................
From: David Thorne
Date: Tuesday 15 May 2001 3.37pm
To: Jason Pritchett
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Proof delivery
Jason,
Yes, I understand Amcor is a global company. We did the brochures.
Would you be willing to extend the cutoff of proof delivery to us for three months? This may allow me time to prepare the business for the loss of our single client and seek alternative commissions.
I’d be willing to drop our fees by 30% for this period as a compromise. I have four people working for me, people with mortgages and car payments to make, and this puts me in a very difficult position.
Regards, David
................................................................................................
From: Jason Pritchett
Date: Tuesday 15 May 2001 4.28pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Proof delivery
I’m unable to change procedures that have already been implemented. I do however wish you all the best in your future endeavors. There is no need to reply to this email.
Jason
...................
We were okay for a few months; I did a lot of legwork and made a lot of calls. We were commissioned by a food manufacturer named Bellis to do their packaging design for a line of fruit bars, and label designs for a large winery in the Barossa Valley named Yaldara, but the work wasn’t consistent and the money began to run out. A few fruit bar and wine label designs might have been enough to keep me afloat if I’d been working freelance, but with four employees wages and rent to cover, it wasn’t even close. I stopped paying myself and unplugged Justin’s lights. The others took pay cuts while we “worked through a rough patch”, but they had no idea how rough it was, I was supplementing their wages out of my personal savings at that point. I lost a lot of sleep, and weight. I lied a lot.
And then Neil Fairhead contacted me.
A man named Andrew Tobin gave Neil my contact details. Andrew ran a small Adelaide based publishing company called National Direct that I’d done a bit of ‘quick & dirty’ work for over the years. He once gave me two weeks to design a book titled Learn To Play Tennis With Patrick Rafter which seems like a reasonable time-frame except I had to take the photos, design the layout, and write the entire thing. Pages 20 through 37 just contain mathematical formula for calculating wind speed that I copied from a meteorological website and most of the close-up photos of Patrick Rafter’s hand holding a tennis racket are actually just me holding a broom.
For those unfamiliar with Patrick Rafter, he’s an Australian tennis player who did alright in the 90s. He was a model and spokesperson for Hayne’s underwear for a while after that but now he’s too old and fat. When I met with him to take the instructional photographs, he was a bit of a dick and told me, “I really don’t have time for this shit, I don’t even know why I agreed to do it - you’ve got five minutes.” Hence the broom photos and the bit in his bio about collecting pinecones and having a pet sheep named Sheryl that shares his bed.
...................
From: Neil Fairhead
Date: Thursday 9 August 2001 2.01pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Branding work
Hello David,
I hope you don’t mind me contacting you out of the blue, Andrew Tobin gave me your email address.
I’m the director of S.A.S.C and I was wondering if we could meet to discuss a project we’re working on. We require a full suite of advertising material, brochures, logo and stationery as we are about to go to market with a new tourism venture.
Is this something you’d be interested in?
Neil Fairhead, Director
Southern Australia Shipping Company
................................................................................................
From: David Thorne
Date: Thursday 9 August 2001 2.37pm
To: Neil Fairhead
Subject: Re: Branding work
Hello Neil,
Thank you for your email. I would certainly be happy to meet and discuss your design requirements. We don’t have a shipping company in our portfolio and it sounds like an interesting project.
Would 12.30pm tomorrow at your office suit?
Regards, David
................................................................................................
From: Neil Fairhead
Date: Thursday 9 August 2001 3.09pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Branding work
David,
12.30 is great but our offices are being painted at the moment. Let’s meet for lunch instead at Zapatas in North Adelaide.
I look forward to meeting you then.
Neil Fairhead, Director
Southern Australia Shipping Company
...................
I paid for lunch. With the volume of work we’d discussed, it seemed the right thing to do. It had also somehow seemed more like a pitch from Neil for me to take on his project than me pitching to take it on, but I put that down to his excitement for the project. It was an exciting project, the scope of which included the branding and livery of their new ship, sales brochures, website, stationery... enough work to keep the agency busy for a few months. Nobody had to fend for themselves in a forest just yet.
The Southern Australian Shipping Company... actually, I’m just going to refer to it as SASC from here on as typing out the whole name is already annoying. Sometimes I use made up keywords instead of long names and just do a global word replace at the end but in the first edition of my last book, I forgot to do the change afterwards and the company name Philip Morris International was referred to as ‘puffmop’ throughout.
SASC, with financing from dozens of National and International investors, had purchased a retired Russian icebreaker for US$35 million. At the time of our meeting, the ship was on route from Russian waters to South Australia with an expected arrival time of eight weeks. It was then going to be refitted for tourism purposes and provide expedition cruises from South Australia to Antarctica. The cruises included trips out onto the ice-shelf to visit Emperor penguin colonies and had the backing of the Australian Geographic Society.
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From: David Thorne
Date: Monday 13 August 2001 10.18am
To: Neil Fairhead
Subject: Proposal
Hello Neil,
Thank you for meeting with me on Friday. My team is excited by the project and keen to get started.
As requested, please find attached our proposal for the branding work required. I’ve broken it down into the three stages discussed.
Feel free to call if you have any questions. Once we have approval and the 25% deposit, we can get started on stage one immediately.
Regards, David
Proposal
Client: Southern Australian Shipping Company
Date: August 13 2001
Scope: Branding, livery, stationery, promotional materials, sales brochures, website etc.
Stage 1
. Branding
Name development ................................................. $1500.00
Logo creation (includes corporate style guide)....... $2800.00
Stationery suite ....................................................... $1300.00
Sub total: $5600.00
Stage 2. Marketing materials
Ship livery mockup (for brochure photos etc).........$500.00
Brochure design & layout (24 page, full colour) ... $3700.00
