Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Part Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Part Three
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Part Four
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Part Five
Acknowledgements
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Copyright © Susan McCorkindale, 2008
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McCorkindale, Susan.
Confessions of a counterfeit farm girl / Susan McCorkindale.
p. cm.
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To my sons, Casey and Cuyler, and my husband, Stu.
There’s nothing counterfeit about my love for you McMen.
Author’s Note
If anyone had ever told me I’d leave my big-city job and suburban home for rural country living I would have declared them a few bristles short of a brush. But here I am, living proof that, while it isn’t pretty, one can learn to survive without Starbucks and New York-style bagels.
This book is based on the past few years of my loony life. It is founded on a series of e-mails I sent to my friends after my family and I moved from beautiful, bustling Ridgewood, New Jersey, to beautiful, anything-but-bustling Upperville, Virginia, where we now reside on a five-hundred-acre beef cattle farm.
In Ridgewood, my husband tended our less than a quarter acre of “land” with a grass mower he pushed around our small patch, and the only wildlife we encountered were squirrels, the occasional rabbit, and our friend Rich, who developed a penchant for setting off fireworks in the middle of our heretofore quiet suburban street on the Fourth of July.
In Upperville, the cattle cut the “lawn,” our wildlife companions have grown to include twenty-six hens, a rooster, two dogs, several foxes, innumerable groundhogs, deer, box turtles, and black snakes, and if we wanted to we could launch fireworks and full-scale mortar attacks from our fields, and no one would ever be the wiser.
In chronicling this bizarre turn my life has taken, I’ve stuck to the old adage “Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.” So kick back, relax, and take my tale with a grain of salt. Preferably on a margarita. Or better yet, a bagel. Oh, what I wouldn’t do for a nice, New York-style salt bagel right now.
Part One
DAYS OF WHINING BIG WIGS
Chapter One
SUSAN MCCORKINDALE, M.D.
The M.D. doesn’t mean what you think it does. But had they published this entire book in my handwriting you’d be certain I was some kind of doctor. That, or a kindergarten dropout.
No, it stands for marketing director, specifically the marketing director for Family Circle magazine, which is what I was before I was lured away from the land of power suits and Jimmy Choos and into the land of chickens. Not to mention cattle, deer, foxes, groundhogs, turkey buzzards, and box turtles.
But I’ll get to my new life in the sticks in a sec. For now I’d like to tell you a little about my hotshot past.
There were lots of things I loved about being at Family Circle. I had a big salary and a big bonus, which allowed me to have a really big closet stuffed with big-name designer clothes. I had a big office, with big sliding glass doors that opened onto my own big conference room. I had a big staff and a big budget. I also had one really big problem: The actual job gave me a big, fat headache.
If you don’t know anything about the marketing function at a magazine, allow me to shed a little light. Marketing supports the advertising sales staff. Without us, the sales people don’t have too much to sell with. Except the magazine. Which you’d think would be enough, considering that’s where the advertising runs, but it isn’t.
No, these days it’s all about programs. You’ve got to have a Big Program in order to pitch, say, Hewlett-Packard. Because if you don’t—horrors!—they’re going with Good Housekeeping. Or Better Homes and Gardens. Or, God forbid, Redbook.
What’s a Big Program, you ask? It’s something that promotes the advertiser’s product outside the pages of the magazine. It’s al
so something the advertiser doesn’t get charged for because they’re doing the magazine the honor of advertising in it, and not in one of its competitors. It’s roughly the equivalent of going into a supermarket and saying, here’s the deal: I’ll pay for the stuff from aisle five but not aisle one. That you can throw in for free or I’m going to a different grocer.
And you wonder why great magazines like Life and Mademoiselle didn’t make it.
As you can imagine, top program development people are in serious demand. I was lucky. I had two of them. On any given day Rich and Kim would dream up a half-dozen different ideas, and four of them were deal makers. Between my two creative geniuses, the magazine raked in hundreds of ad pages and hundreds of thousands of dollars. And because they were—and still are—two of the industry’s thriftiest multitiered platform1 pros, the programs they pitched didn’t cost us a lot to execute.
Believe me when I tell you that I loved Rich and Kim. And their internists did, too.2
There were seven other members of my marketing team, all of whom did about a million jobs, including executing the programs Rich and Kim came up with. There were the glamorous Cory and Whitney, and the brilliant and talented Barbara and Noel. There was sweet Lisa, whom we saved from Sales, and, of course, New York sophisticate Janine, and J. Crew catalog-cute Ryan (whom I expect will get married at any minute). I’m not going to bore you with the intimate details of their job descriptions, but suffice it to say that each was more than a dozen bulleted lines long.
And that was before I divvied up my job nine ways and gave them each a chunk of it to do, too.
Hold on, hold on. This isn’t going to be one of those self-centered, boss-behaving-badly books. I was a good manager. I loved my staff. It was my actual job that I hated. Why? Because I just couldn’t get my natty Anna Sui knickers in a bunch about getting or not getting a particular piece of business. I didn’t see the whole thing as crucial to keeping the world spinning on its axis. I just couldn’t drink the Kool-Aid and elevate magazine marketing and program development to cancer-research status.
I was burned out, apathetic, and bored. Stealing the Pampers business from Parenting no longer made me so happy I could’ve wet my own pants. And the extra effort involved in getting an extra spread3 from Clorox (which involved kissing the butt of that account’s asshole head honcho) made me so sick I might as well have poured bleach on my brain.
I’d simply reached the point where I couldn’t get worked up about a big win or a big loss. It didn’t matter to me. It hadn’t fed a starving child, stopped the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, or made my boobs bigger. (And hey, if that had happened just once, it would’ve definitely renewed my appreciation for my post.)
Nope. I was fried. But I couldn’t just quit. My husband and I had two kids and a mortgage to pay. And I had a very serious addiction to the designer department at Neiman Marcus. We’d miss my big paycheck in a big way. I had to do something, but what?
And then one day it hit me. I had nothing but stars on my staff, people who’d no doubt one day be marketing directors. Why not give them a taste of the position . . . today?
I went in, divvied up my job description, and doled it out. And nobody blinked. In fact, they were thrilled. Every single one of them was smart enough to realize I’d just made them eminently more employable. And for much bigger bucks. All I needed to do now was manage them managing my tasks.
Problem was, they really didn’t need me.
And so I was left trying to find ways to kill the hours between eight thirty and five thirty. At first it was tough. But after a while, I got good at it. So good, that I began spreading the “No work at work” news to anyone (outside of Family Circle, of course) who would listen. Ultimately I developed a patent-pending list of ten ways to pass the work day. Yes, you have my permission to use them.
Suzy’s Top Ten Ways to Pass the Workday
1. Exercise
I have a confession to make: I’m a fitness freak. The whole time I was a “powerhouse” marketing pro, I taught kickboxing classes at night. As you can imagine, being stuck at work pretending to do my job left me little time to prepare my routines, so I did what any reasonable human being would do: I put my staff through my sets. I dragged them into my office and got them jabbing, jogging in place, high kicking, lunging, and leg lifting. At the end of one month, we’d lost a collective twenty-five pounds and sixteen pairs of pumps. If I’m ever a marketing director again, I’m putting a line for Reeboks in the budget.
2. Manage Your Minibar
If you’ve got a big job, chances are you’ve got a big office. And if you’ve got a big office, you’ve probably got a refrigerator. Sure, you could let staffers keep their stinky leftover chipotle salads in your sweet KitchenAid, or you could do your entire team a favor and keep it stocked with fine wine, lite beer, fruit, cheese, and chocolate. After all, what’s more important—tuna that hasn’t turned, or the chance to get buzzed after a big meeting? Right. Now send your assistant out for ice.
3. Decorate
Nothing says “I’m too busy to bother with bullshit” like a hammer in your hand. Shop the Pottery Barn catalog for wall vases, mirrors, and paintings of oversized poppies, then spend a good portion of each day putting them up.
And taking them down. And moving them to a different spot over your desk. And calling office services to work their magic patching the wall. If this tome teaches you nothing else, let it be this: Those who don’t want to deal, decorate.
4. Clean
Cleaning works almost as well as fussing with your furnishings, only here your weapons are a box of Clorox wipes and a bottle of Windex. The combination of those two acrid aromas will keep most bosses at bay. Throw in the sight of you scurrying around with a Swiffer and a DustBuster, and I can almost guarantee that entire fiscal periods will pass before you’re forced to make a meeting.
5. Plan a Party
We’ve all heard of bosses who spend all day online planning their weddings. Or their parents’ fiftieth anniversary party. Or their boyfriend’s “Finally Sober!” soiree. Big whoop-dee-do. The party to plan and throw is an office party for those who work for you. After all, they’re doing your job. Or at least my staff was doing mine. So the least I could do was order several cases of La Crema chardonnay, five hundred dollars’ worth of food, and a DJ. Once every six weeks. Oh, and I had a disco ball installed in the conference room ceiling. Just my way of saying thanks for their willingness to hustle.
6. Attend a Pretend Power Lunch
The pretend power lunch is a terrific way to shoot almost an entire workday. Why? Because it starts midmorning and doesn’t end till almost dinnertime. At about eleven a.m., you stop what little you’re doing to organize your briefcase. First you ask your assistant to find certain Important Files. Since they don’t really exist, this will cause a bit of a ruckus, and soon everyone will be rushing about, trying to help you “get to your lunch on time!” After thirty minutes or so, you say, “Forget the files,” you’ll muddle through without them, and head to the ladies’ room to touch up your makeup. Twenty-five minutes later you emerge, refreshed and fabulous. You grab your coat, bag, and empty briefcase, tell your assistant you could be “gone a while,” and hail a cab. Fifteen minutes later, the nice ladies at the St. John store are fawning all over you, taking your lunch order and your measurements. Three hours after that, you check your “CrackBerry,” return a few e-mails, then text your team to say you’re heading home with a migraine. Sure, the power lunch was bogus. But the headache’s real. Waiting for a seven-hundred-dollar skirt to be altered is enough to give anyone an aneurism.
7. Catch up on Your Reading (aka, “I’m working on the budget”)
The budget was the one part of my job I didn’t give away. And that’s because I didn’t actually do it. My business manager did. Twice a month my financial guru and dear friend Marilyn would stroll into my office, plop a spreadsheet on my desk, and point out the ways in which she’d once again saved my bacon. �
��OK, you’ve blown through your sales materials budget,” she’d say, “but you had thirty-five thousand stashed in presentations, and another fifteen thousand in in-store promotions, so I moved money around and you’re golden again.” Of course nobody knew it was this simple,4 so I was able to use “working on the budget” as an excuse to hide behind my frosted-glass double doors and spend half the day devouring multiple issues of Cosmo and massive amounts of peanut M&M’s.5
8. Take a Meeting
This might sound suspiciously like work, but you don’t really do anything. Other people do. Simply schedule all the Web site developers, ad agencies, and public relations firms,6 the sales incentive companies, point-of-purchase display makers, caterers, and party planners who bombard you twenty-four/seven with their phone calls, postcards, sales brochures, and e-mail blasts to come in on the same day and make their pitch. Politely pretend to listen, take the occasional note, and say such insightful things as “I really don’t see what use a consumer magazine has for a refrigerated truck, but tell me, is your top Tahari?” You won’t buy anything, but you might be sold on several new designer brands by the close of business.
9. Watch a Movie
This was one of my favorite ways to waste time. Why? Because I was expected to do it. In order to conduct one of our most successful Big Programs, Family Circle Family Movie Night (to which readers were invited to sneak previews of brand new movies), someone had to screen the features first. And that someone was me. Most of the time I got to see the film under consideration.7 But other times, when the film wasn’t finished, I was forced to see the movies it was compared to. “It’s like Scary Movie meets Titanic,” said my contact at one of the major movie studios, “only it takes place on a plane.” When this happened, I’d have them send me copies of both films on DVD, as well as the shooting script. Then I’d whip up some microwave popcorn8 and settle in for a four-hour film festival. The best part was hearing my assistant tell callers, “Sorry, Susan’s tied up today. She’s greenlighting a picture for Paramount.”
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