Ad Nomad

by Eric Jay Sonnenschein

  On his way out, Dane saw a glow of light from a cubicle. Marjorie, the elderly copywriter, was scrutinizing a layout. She blinked and smiled. “You’re still here? Don’t tell me you’re dedicated.”

  “I get things done when I have to.”

  Then Marjorie stretched. Dane saw that her slender arms were graceful and her sweater clung to her torso, revealing shapely breasts. Marjorie assumed a yoga stance. As she moved her head, Dane caught her at an angle and made a discovery. Marjorie looked like a woman he had seen on the free porn website. He said good night and told himself he must be imagining things. Was it possible that after her monkish day job she became that miracle of nature—a granny porn model?

  Driving home, with nothing beyond talk radio to consider, Dane wondered why Marjorie posed for a porn website. Was she so poorly paid that she showed her private parts to make ends meet—or merely bored?

  Dane rolled into his neighborhood at 10 o’clock. There were no parking spaces, only dog-walkers. Many people had settled in his community lured by the promise of abundant street parking, only to create a vicious scarcity. For two hours Dane circled before squeezing into a spot. He walked into his apartment after midnight.

  17. FISHBOWL REVISITED

  On Monday, Sylvia ordered Dane to make hundreds of pages of Xerox copies of thirty references.

  “But isn’t that the traffic person’s job?”

  “She can’t do it. She’s planning a wedding shower.”

  Dane saw no purpose in protest or argument. He did what she asked of him. When Sylvia stopped by the machines to check up on him, he handed her the stack with a flourish, still trying to please her.

  “You did these all wrong!” she cried. “You can’t write copy and now you can’t even make copies!”

  “But these are the ones you asked for!” Dane pleaded. He wanted so much for her to say he was good at something to stem the hemorrhage of his reputation.

  “I don’t have time to explain…” she said, dropping the stack of papers.

  “It’s not my job to make copies anyway,” Dane retorted angrily as she walked away.

  Bevaqua, who was in the supply room next to the copy room, pilfering Sharpies, overheard Dane.

  “Dane, can I have a word with you in my fishbowl?” he asked. Dane followed after him, like a boy on his way to the principal’s office.

  “Four members of your team have complained about you,” Bevaqua said. “They allege that you don’t listen.”

  “I thought I was doing well.”

  ‘Ditto. That’s why these reports hurt deeply,” Bevaqua made a fist, which he pressed against his chest. “Do you know your job?”

  “Of course,” Dane replied.

  “There are reports,” Bevaqua sighed.

  “Reports of what?”

  “Serious accusations.”

  “Accusations?” Dane felt a pounding on his chest. It was his own fist. Unconsciously, he was imitating Bevaqua. “Wait! I never saw reports.”

  “Of course you didn’t. You generate reports of incompetence, insubordination, and incontinence, and I’m the one who reviews and evaluates them.”

  “I was never incontinent.”

  “What about incompetent?”

  “No.”

  Bevaqua squinted at the paper.

  “I need my glasses. Oh, here they are: incompetence and insubordination,” Bevaqua flinched and covered his eyes. “It hurts to read or speak these words.”

  Dane sank into the chair to absorb his shaking. He felt weak and dizzy. He had abyss sickness. It came when you sank to new depths with great velocity. Only weeks ago, Dane had attained a career pinnacle, branding an agency and creating a theory for effective advertising. Now he clung to his job, weighed down by a freight of free-floating remorse for being his sorry self. His family counted on him and he was failing them. His first paycheck had put the brakes on their freefalling finances but at this rate his income stream might soon end. Even his health benefits did not take effect for days. He must save his job at least until then.

  “You and I…we don’t know what to make of this. We need someone who knows,” Bevaqua said.

  The executive vice president of creative summoned Karen into the fishbowl. She sat against one corner of the table; Bevaqua leaned against the other corner. They triangulated Dane with scowls. On the glass table between them sat a manuscript. Bevaqua regarded Karen gravely, indicating that they were to start their procedure. Bevaqua handed the paper to Dane.

  “Dane, have you ever seen this manuscript?”

  It was the Contruro messaging assignment—six words in thirty different sentence combinations.

  “Yes,” Dane said. “I worked on it last Friday.”

  “Do you notice anything peculiar about this manuscript?”

  Dane scrutinized the three printout sheets—and grew agitated. They looked fine. They were written on UNIHEALTH stationery. He reviewed the thirty sentences. He believed he had done well on this assignment and nothing he saw now contradicted this impression. So why was he to blame?

  “Two large red circles are on the first page,” Dane noted, then added a forensic detail. “They smell like magic marker. I didn’t do that.”

  “I know you didn’t, Dane!” Bevaqua replied. “That is a red marker, which is color-coded for Sylvia. You’re only allowed to use a brown marker. Do you see what is circled?”

  Dane read the circled statements several times but could not interpret their encirclements.

  “No, I’m sorry. It means nothing to me.”

  “They have LUTS in them,” Karen blurted. “LUTS! LUTS! We told you to remove it from all messages as of last week. So you turn around and write LUTS, not once, but twice.”

  “Dane, were you aware that LUTS was banned from Contruro messages?” Bevaqua demanded officiously.

  “I was unaware it had to disappear,” Dane admitted. “I was also unaware I put it in.”

  “So you were totally unaware,” Bevaqua concluded.

  “It was a Friday evening. I worked on it for hours,” Dane replied. “I was told to spice up the statements and LUTS was the spice that came to mind, I guess.”

  “But you were told to use only the six words in the message. Six words!” Karen cried out, displaying five fingers on one hand and one on the other. “And LUTS wasn’t one of them.”

  Dane thought obtuseness, Friday night fatigue, and the omission of a petty detail under pressure comprised an effective three-excuse regimen. However, Bevaqua and Karen’s faces showed no understanding or forgiveness; admission of a simple lapse would only feed their firing frenzy. Dane must present his oversight as something other than a blunder.

  “Look, I didn’t do it on purpose but maybe subconsciously I inserted LUTS because I like the acronym. Even before my first day here I studied LUTS. It’s part of me now.”

  “That is so wrong! “ Bevaqua thundered. “We are professionals here. We can’t indulge attachments to acronyms, no matter how attracted we are to them. If you were directed not to insert LUTS you should have resisted your impulses.”

  Seeing how emotional the LUTS issue was to Bevaqua, Dane reversed himself.

  “Look, it was a typo, okay? I must have keystroked LUTS out of habit. It was Friday night. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  Karen grimaced.

  “This worries me. You claim you wrote LUTS on purpose. Then you say it was an accident. Who are you? And how can I believe you?”

  Dane knew he was cornered so he came out fighting with a desperate last charge—common sense.

  “So I inserted LUTS twice in thirty messages. That’s less than 7%. Which means I had it right 93% of the time. That’s a phenomenal success rate!”

  Bevaqua shook his head at Dane with the grief of a father betrayed. “I can’t believe what I’m hearing! At UNIHEALTH, nothing less than 100% is acceptable.”

  Dane was sinking in the morass of their inquisition. He had been so proud of the messages he created from a few bo
ring words and the speed with which he crafted them, yet even his good work was bent against him because the infamous LUTS worm infiltrated two of thirty statements. Bevaqua’s grim countenance told Dane he would need something very special to exonerate himself this time—a truly audacious excuse.

  “A mistake may have been made,” Dane pleaded. “But I don’t know your procedures and nobody took the time to explain them.”

  Dane had few business skills, however devising excuses was one of his best. As a copy supervisor, Dane was expected to know procedure but since UNIHEALTH never provided him with an official procedure orientation, how was he to know? Employees had few rights worth recognizing in pharmaceutical advertising but a procedure orientation was sacrosanct. Procedure, more than logo, slogan and mission statement combined, identified the character of a corporation because it defined how it conducted business. By failing to provide Dane with a procedure orientation, UNIHEALTH failed its own procedure.

  Bevaqua and Karen had not anticipated this twist. While they scrambled for a coherent response, Dane filibustered.

  “While someone was napping at the procedure switch, I stayed late Friday evening to get those messages done—and I nailed them. That’s commitment. But nobody cared enough to stick around and read them. So now you crucify me over an acronym in a sentence. People, is that all we’re talking about here? LUTS?”

  “We’re not talking about a four letter word. There’s a big picture here,” Bevaqua rebutted, looking as hard-boiled as a ten minute egg. “The word is a symptom of a larger problem.”

  Bevaqua waved his arms in a circle to emphasize the largeness. He showed Dane a page out of the brochure that passed through Dane’s hands the previous week. A circle marked one page where the reference number 7 was followed by a 10.

  “What happened to references 8 and 9?” Bevaqua asked.

  Dane squinted at the document. He admitted that the references in question were non-existent.

  “Yes, I skipped numbers 8 and 9, but I want to point out that I was the one who removed the bad references Sylvia inserted. I had no time to follow up.”

  Bevaqua’s eyes narrowed. Dane thought he had been nailed.

  “Why was Sylvia doing references?” Bevaqua asked.

  “Karen told her to go for it. So she did them wrong,” Dane said.

  Bevaqua scowled at Karen. Dane had driven a wedge between them.

  “Sylvia’s been on us about referencing from the get-go. You know how it’s been,” Karen said.

  “Do I ever! Thank you, Dane. You’ve given me the smoked herring I need,” Bevaqua said. “If account people are running around doing references, they can’t scapegoat creatives for their mistakes. We’re adults, which means we’re accountable. We’re done here. But Dane needs a procedures orientation. Karen, can you make that happen? I’ve got another meeting.”

  Dane had survived. That he measured his job by survival rather than success indicated how far he had fallen—from genius to deadbeat in four weeks. His hire at UNIHEALTH was a fiasco but his family needed health coverage, which would take effect in two days. Bevaqua and Karen may have intended to cut him off before the benefits kicked in, but Dane eluded the trap. He would probably receive his benefits before he got fired.

  It seemed an attainable goal but he did not know how sick UNIHEALTH was making him and how his illness would manifest itself in a meeting devoted to procedures.

  18. PROCESS MAKES PERFECT

  The next morning Dane received an e-mail announcing his emergency procedural orientation. At 3 o’clock he entered a small conference room, where several department heads stood before a blackboard. On the slate someone wrote “Welcome Dane!” in rounded letters with the side of a fat chalk. At the long table, one chair was set. A place card with his name was in front of it, with a pad, a laminated chart and a pencil with the UNIHEALTH logo. No effort was spared to make Dane feel like a first grader.

  A hefty stapled document was handed to Dane. It was the text for his tutorial. On page one an anatomical chart of the organization described the process in boxes and arrows. Each box contained a department name and listed its functions, while the arrows showed the procedural flow: client→ account→ production→ account services→ writer→ account services→ writer→ art director→ editorial→ account services. Arrows were the vessels of UNIHEALTH, transporting projects from client need to fulfillment. The presentation could have taken ten minutes but persisted for two hours.

  This system was universal but since Dane requested this session to edify his clueless self, he played the grateful screw-up, ravenous for redemption. After pleading ignorance of the process, he feigned astonishment at its miraculous workings. Dane flipped the pages while his tutors lectured. With wide eyes, effusive head nods, and cramping hand, he scribbled the verbose testimony of a procession of department heads.

  He raised his hand effusively in response to one slide.

  “Yes?” the presenter asked, baffled by Dane’s observance of classroom etiquette and his urgent manner. He was, after all, the only student.

  “The red tag copy box leads to the blue ribbon editorial review,” Dane said. “Does the copy change between those boxes?”

  “All queries must be answered and all copy changes made as required by all processors,” the presenter replied.

  “I mean, does the folder change color from red to blue?” Dane asked.

  “No! However, the copy itself receives a blue stamp,” the presenter acknowledged.

  “Oh, wow. That is so cool!” Dane gushed and nodded his head so hard that he felt vertebrae crack.

  Given the choice of being a resentful, remedial delinquent and an enthusiastic partner in the education process, he chose the latter.

  However, like many underachievers forced to repeat a pedagogical step, Dane underestimated the psychic injury inflicted by remediation—the punitive boredom as well as the insult to pride and intellect. The conjunction of his tutors’ condescension, primary school pedagogy and the banal subject matter made Dane’s mind swim from particulars to a larger picture. Process was no longer how work was done; it was the work itself. Kinko’s could produce ads and brochures; agencies sold process. Advertising people created less and processed more. Process was popular; it covered the greater collective ass.

  Dane’s hand traced the process chart. He fleshed it out, circled the boxes, added lines and shaded spaces, out of which he made muscles, limbs, a head, torso, extremities and sexual glands. In minutes he had created the process incarnate, a complex evolutional amalgam of Leviathan, Nude Descending a Staircase and Mr. Potato Head.

  His stomach gurgled. He was hungry. He had not gone out for his usual Wednesday Taco Bell burritos. The traffic manager was pointing with a red laser at a slide projected on the screen behind her. However, she no longer wore clothes. Her body had a pale brown hue and the shape of a bellows. She had been transformed into a stomach. Sloshing sounds issued from her mouth as her body contracted rhythmically.

  Dane’s gut responded to the lecturing stomach with a growl of its own. “It’s all in the process,” his stomach said.

  Now another department head took the floor. He had a long, curved back and a bulging stomach, and stood on large, waddling feet. His color was brown and pink and he resembled an intestine. The sounds coming out of his mouth were gurgles and flatulent trumpet notes.

  Dane’s own gut growled again. “Process of elimination,” It quipped. “You’re being eliminated. What a waste. Gurgle, gurgle.”

  “You’re being rude!” Dane whispered. “You’ll get me in trouble.”

  “Yes, Dane? Did you have a question?” the speaker asked.

  “No, no. It’s clear,” Dane told the traffic manager without looking up.

  A woman stood up. The head of editorial had a ruddy, mobile face, the muscles of which contracted like a heart as she spoke about preparing the perfect manuscript. The sounds that emanated from her were thumpathumapthumpa punctuated by a whish.

 
The process was embodied before his eyes.

  “Process makes perfect!” his gut growled. “Process makes perfect!”

  “Shut up, impudent gut!” Dane shouted. “I won’t keep listening to your crap!”

  The lecture had stopped. The process mavens stared at Dane as individuals offended not for themselves personally, but in behalf of all civilized human beings who embody a process. He must account for his unspeakable speaking. But what could he tell the department heads to make himself seem less offensive or less insane?

  “Sorry. I’m trying to write down every word but my hand is cramping. I’m getting impatient with myself.”

  “No worries,” the editor said sympathetically.

  Still, Dane worried.

  Dozing off and posing irrelevant questions to stay awake or to aggravate people were standard behavior for Dane. Hallucinating talking body organs and conversations with his gut were legitimate cause for concern. Was he losing control of his incorrigibility? Or was this the latest event in the process of copywriting castration that took root as a loss of sexual feeling, grew into rampant porn abuse, and now blossomed as body organ fetishism and delusional fantasy?

  19. PART OF THE FAMILY

  The highway was congested that evening. His drive would be longer than usual, but Dane did not mind the commute. It helped him flush out the toxins of the office and reflect on the day. As Dane sat in traffic, he considered the procedure meeting that just passed.

  It was clear now that Dane had been lied to about finding a home at UNIHEALTH. The best he could do now was to keep it from destroying his real home.

  Dane often took pride that he did not bring the job home with him. However, the shame and frustration he experienced at work were powerful and insidious. They stowed away in his mind and subverted his good intentions.