Amateur Hour

by Kimberly Harrington

  Key Responsibilities

  You will be responsible for literally everything, including but not limited to:

  Keeping coworkers alive.

  Related to the above, supervision of all possible hazards including: electrical currents, water in all forms (baths, sheets of ice, swimming pools, Slip ‘N Slides, lakes, dodgy sprinklers, igloos, et cetera), table corners, dogs that have food-sharing issues, uncut grapes, playground equipment, bees.

  Plan, purchase, and prepare all meals,* including feeding youngest coworker with own breasts. We know.

  Read every book. Provide verbal CliffsNotes version to adult partner who apparently can’t read these same books although you know for a fact he’s a college graduate because that’s where you guys met. You actually studied together. He’s capable of reading, processing, and retaining volumes upon volumes of complex information. Nevertheless. Observe verbal CliffsNotes go in one ear and out the other. Expect increasing levels of rage to be continuously offset by the knowledge you are only growing more superior with each book. You’ll find more details on this and other resentment-inducing scenarios in our employee handbook under Section 2: “You’re the One Who Wanted to Get Married.” Suck it up, doll.

  Become unnaturally intrigued by what gets stains out of clothing, trade tips with other moms and hate yourself for it, bookmark stain chat blogs and hate yourself for it, share hot tips (sunlight! vinegar!) with your friends via text and hate yourself for it. Stitch your vagina shut for good; you are no longer a sexual being.

  Exercise more in less time and with greater difficulty than you ever have at any other point in your life. Expect marginal improvement. You can do it! Sort of!

  Prepare to assume the responsibilities of pets your coworkers have begged for and then subsequently abandoned. Steel yourself for spending $95 on a vet appointment for a pet mouse while you have no fewer than nine mousetraps lying in wait in your basement for her cousins. It’s a real Upstairs Downstairs–type situation.

  Schedule and oversee all medical, dental, therapy, school, family, sports, and camp meetings and appointments. Do not miss a single one; the successful functioning of and all future happiness associated with this organization depend on it. No pressure, sweetheart.

  Plan company off-sites/“vacations.” Oversee reservations and coordination of overpriced rental minivan, multiple flights that will ultimately not work out, strange babysitters, creepy outdated tours you had a free coupon for, family-friendly restaurants where all human hope goes to die, and other assorted details. Create packing list. Create shopping list. Create list for house sitter. Create list for pet sitter. Create list of reasons why everyone should go on this godforsaken trip without you. Weep.

  Stay on trend but not too on trend, if you know what we mean. Don’t look dowdy, but don’t look like you’re trying to dress like a teenager for God’s sake. Wear things that are flattering but not too revealing. Bare shoulders are okay as long as the rest of your arms are fully sheathed. Please stop wearing capri pants; they look terrible on everyone. Fedoras and big floppy hats should be avoided, unless you’re actually at the beach and need to shield your delicate aging facial skin from both the sun and passersby. Bottom line: you’re culturally irrelevant—embrace it!

  Create budgets for the week, month, year, five years, until death, after death. Hopefully you’ll be reincarnated as someone who understands money.

  Prepare to become proficient at smiling through misery; expert level at doling out cheerful phrases that do not at all reflect one’s inner monologue, while also appearing to care about what others have to say (example: “I’m doing great! And you?”); and beginner level at just straight-up lying (improvement in this last area is inevitable over time).

  Relax! Remember self-care is important. In fact, it’s the main focus for most white ladies. You should definitely make time for it. After all the other responsibilities are taken care of, of course. Why are you so tired and crabby? Try harder, please.

  Supervisor

  This position reports to coworkers younger and less qualified than you. They will also have little regard for your personal space; may pull your shirt up in public; slap you on the ass (also in public); wonder aloud why your arms, legs, and/or stomach are so “squishy”; and will not at all listen to your opinions. They may, on occasion, order you around and be clearly unappreciative of your efforts. You’re a woman, you should be used to this sort of thing in the workplace by now.

  Skills and Experience

  Nothing will prepare you for this. Not babysitting, not having a dog, and certainly not your childbirth class. Maybe get some sleep or eat chocolate-covered pretzels in your underpants?

  Salary Range and Benefits

  Should’ve mentioned it before, but this is actually an unpaid position. Sort of falls into the same category as other bullshit your friends have roped you into by saying something patently false like, “This could be great!” The benefits vary depending on experience, number of coworkers, and whether you have enough money to hire a staff. PS, you should definitely hire a staff. In the first few years the benefits will mostly consist of coworkers not being able to comment on your alcohol consumption in a loud shouting voice in public, since they haven’t mastered full sentences yet. In the later years, your benefits will include unpaid vacation, unpaid sick days, unpaid nervous breakdowns but also someone who will bring you your coffee or reading glasses from the next room where you forgot them. You will have frequent access to the full range of your emotions, especially the shouting- and crying-related ones.

  Type of Employment

  This is a volunteer, unpaid, full-time job. If you have paid employment outside the home, this is still a full-time job. You will have to sort that out for yourself. The primary purpose of this position is to train your coworkers to become more competent, independent, well-adjusted, and successful than you. Don’t be afraid to occasionally whisper “Marry for money” to them when no one’s around. Who cares? Times change, love is fickle, and working is hard.

  How We Measure Success

  Success in this position—while prematurely announced by those who are currently breastfeeding five-year-olds—may only be accurately measured roughly ten or twenty or thirty years after your last coworker has left his or her in-house position. Why are you crying? Please note: once your coworker has moved on, you will no longer be allowed into the majority of his or her waking moments and certainly not the sleeping ones. Your former coworkers will typically not be terribly vocal about whether they feel your tenure was a success, or what they’re doing now on a day-to-day basis. Sometimes they won’t even tell you what they’ve had to eat or who they are with! Honestly the feedback process and yearly reviews for this position are a nightmare, if they happen at all. Many employees find Thanksgiving to be an unusually popular time for performance reviews, but we do not recommend it.

  Summary

  The primary purpose of this position is to train the people you love most in this world to leave you. Forever.

  Told you it was dumb.

  The Super Bowl of Interruptions

  Consider, if you will, the Super Bowl. When you combine fighter jets, a sport that’s become the bloated host for an entire country’s parasitic soul, and a spectacle that renders parody redundant, you can bet your backside that advertisers will come running just to throw garbage bags full of cash at it. And where garbage bags full of cash are, so are advertising agencies. And where there are advertising agencies and garbage bags full of cash, there are copywriters and art directors willing to cut each other’s throats to get a piece of that action.

  Creatives are a special breed, some finding themselves in advertising purely by chance, laziness, or a sweet hookup. We are the potential novelists, the frustrated painters, the delusional screenwriters, the weekend illustrators, and the gullible Mad Men—or, worse, Melrose Place—viewers. On one hand we feel above it all, while on the other we’re perpetually at the ready to lose our ever-loving shit over the
shape of a color swatch in a product description. We regularly pull a muscle carefully cultivating a sense of cool; a studied casualness of Hey, man, whatever.

  In reality we are almost never “whatever” about anything. We are right down there, in the petty weeds. We are either seething with insecurity or have so overcompensated for some perceived slight ten years ago that our egos need their own assistant and a wheelbarrow. We have followed a career path founded on never knowing the right answers, and if that’s not a recipe for crazy I’m not sure what is. If you work in accounting, there are facts. When you work in a creative industry, you are staking your professional satisfaction on subjectivity. Your fortunes rise and fall on whether someone is “feeling” what you’re doing.

  Nowhere are all these realities more blatantly on display than in the run up to the Super Bowl. You can know nothing at all about advertising and still know that working on a Super Bowl spot is one of the biggest—if not the biggest—“gets” in the industry. But those kinds of gigs aren’t just handed out at the door. You don’t just cruise into your reclaimed-wood cube with industrial metal standing desk on a Tuesday morning and get handed the brief for a bunch of sponsored Instagram posts and, oh yeah, what’s this thing again? Oh right, A SUPER BOWL COMMERCIAL. Sometimes you’re just lucky or (let’s hope) damn talented. Or maybe you’re just a sociopath with an especially stunning array of tattoos where your soul should be. Or maybe, just maybe, you’re the creative director who’s gonna go ahead and assign those plums to yourself. We see you, motherfuckers.

  As a middle-aged freelancer who lives in Vermont and also happens to be a mother, I had given up any hope of ever working on a Super Bowl spot. Primarily because I’m smart and can understand situations that are crystalline in their clarity. I can’t imagine a person with more strikes against her, at the risk of mixing my sports metaphors.

  Super Bowl gigs are often kept in-house, so everyone can enjoy watching their coworkers’ sense of self-worth get annihilated on the way to the winning idea. And sometimes they’re gifted to fancy creatives who work at big, fancy freelance rates, all while having either exactly zero kids or a wife at home taking care of everything while they wank off deep into the night over bloated pickup trucks and glistening fast-food sandwiches.

  And then there’s me. When I was laid off, I entered a world where my work was molded around mothering instead of the other way around. If you find yourself in a situation like this, it’s extraordinarily difficult to go back to the way things were. You have seen the other side; you are dependent on the daily contact and the rhythm of the school bus, the revolving door of field-trip permission slips, this life free of cubicles and Ping-Pong tables. Plus, let’s face it, you are exceedingly lazy now. You can’t believe how hard you used to work—what was that even all about anyway? You are spoiled by your retiree-like schedule, where you can go to the market at ten o’clock in the morning and call it a day at two thirty in the afternoon. You have proven the theory, once and for all, that “good enough” wins over “die trying.”

  Because of this mix of parental attachment and feral freelancer entitlement, I’ve turned down full-time positions I would’ve happily stabbed someone in the face for fifteen years ago. I’ve missed out on freelance gigs with some of the best ad agencies and most prominent brands in the world, all because the thought of being away from my kids for a month or three months at a time didn’t really do it for me. When you won’t drop your life like a hot potato for work, work drops you like a hot potato. Not always and not forever, but obviously people need to know what they’re dealing with. If you can’t commit for weeks on end, then you’re just not for them. Do you know what kind of freelance female creatives are usually for them? The kind who don’t have kids.

  But here’s the funny thing about life, just when you’ve long ago accepted there are certain experiences you’ll never have, that’s exactly when those things come roaring in. Sometimes they come roaring in via your LinkedIn in-box. And if you’re thinking, This is the only time I’ve ever heard of anything productive happening on LinkedIn, I would just like to say, “Me too.”

  A creative director who got my name from a mutual friend reached out with a deceptively innocuous note: something about needing a particular combination of talents for a project and asking about my availability and interest. I have received roughly fifty messages like this over the past eight years. And the ones I’ve fielded from people I don’t know personally usually result in projects with budgets of anywhere from zero to seven dollars. No thank you.

  I hedged my response, as I always do, indicating I would need to know more—money, client, timing—before I could give a clear answer on my availability. As for whether I was interested? I’m a freelancer; I’m always interested.

  We hopped on the phone and that’s when he dropped three key details, as I imagine he was gleefully waiting to do:

  Super Bowl.

  Car client.

  A spot targeted at women.

  Two days later, I was on a plane to Detroit.

  I’m not saying it’s a big adjustment to go from working in a recliner or at your dining room table or sprawled out across your bed in Vermont with a dog as your only daytime companion to being in an all-day briefing session for one of the most important projects of your professional life, but I will say I was throwing back half tabs of Xanax like they were Tic Tacs.

  But then it all comes back to you. You feel giddy over a briefing deck, a thick stack of paper that includes such classics as the one thing we want to get across, swiped images, and target-audience slicing and dicing. I grabbed my phone and scrolled through the list of all the other creatives on this project, landing on names I recognized. I stared at the cover sheet to the briefing deck again, the words Super Bowl Spot practically telescoping off the page, cartoon-style. There were multiple teams in multiple locations all across the country. Creatives there in person, creatives on the phone, creatives who were so important or busy they had to have their own separate briefing sessions. There must have been forty of us. It might as well have been a hundred.

  After our one day of meetings, a quick detour to the Henry Ford museum, and an overwhelming trip through John K. King Used & Rare Books, my new partner and I were able to return home—him on the West Coast and me on the East—and work on the entire project remotely. As much as I like working on-site and with actual humans (most actual humans, okay some, maybe a few), being able to throw myself into this huge important project while still being able to see my kids off in the morning and tuck them in at night was both obnoxious and amazing.

  But. There it is, but: the other thing about having kids around when you work from home is they interrupt. They interrupt a whole lot. Like sharks with fresh blood in the water, they can sense not only that they’re being ignored but also that you must have something important at stake. They don’t want to professionally destroy you of course, yet are biologically compelled to do so.

  I know this. My own mother worked from home. It’s not like I can’t see it from their perspective, because I absolutely can. Whenever she was on a call—on a phone attached to the wall no less—I would walk under the cord and flip it over and then walk back under the cord and flip it over and do it again and one more time, over and over and over again until I finally came up against her face in my path, phone pressed against her chest and a hiss of, “Will. You. Stop that?”

  Because I’ve worked from home for almost their entire childhoods, or at least the part they can remember, we’ve had long-standing rules about work calls:

  Do not interrupt me.

  I will tell you when I’m going to be on a call and approximately how long it will take.

  Do not interrupt me.

  I will go into my bedroom and close the door to make it easier for you to not interrupt me.

  If you interrupt me, you had better be bleeding.

  I can’t emphasize enough that blood should be visible.

  Opening the door, shoving a note in my
face, and/or pantomiming your questions all still count as interrupting.

  Actual blood.

  The pressure on this project picked up immediately. We began calling into full-team creative reviews that could last two or more hours. Spending that much time in an actual meeting is painful. Spending that much time with a phone pressed to your ear is probably covered somewhere in the Geneva convention.

  The upside to these epic calls, at least for me, was listening to all the other teams’ ideas. Or at least all the ideas I could listen to until they kicked me off. I figured this was not only my first but also likely my last rodeo on the Super Bowl front. I was determined to get everything I could out of the experience. I wanted to hear how other teams presented (did I even know how to present anymore?), how they approached the work and rationalized it (were our ideas any good?), how they reacted to criticism and redirection (am I advocating for our ideas enough? Too much? Gah.).

  This wasn’t about who “got” the job. We all had the job, whether we were freelancers or full-timers. We were all getting paid to generate, generate, generate. It was about getting as many ideas out there as quickly as possible, cutting the ones that had no hope of working, and diving more deeply into the ones that had promise. Fueled by a cocktail of panic, greed, insecurity, and bragging rights, we were all a perfect match for a sporting event that is the epitome of every one of those things.

  Although I was nervous about sharing our work at first, that nervousness quickly dissipated as a couple of teams presented work that was not only bad but also so tone-deaf as to actually be offensive. And there I was, bathing in the dark joy of listening to fellow human beings go down in flames. High school truly never ends.