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385 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
It was an era of take-ones and tchotchkes. The world was flush with internet cash and we got our fair share of it. It was our position that logo design was every bit as important as product performance and distribution systems. 'Wicked cool' were the words we used to describe our logo designs. 'Bush league' were the words we used we used to describe the logo designs of other agencies - unless it was a really well-designed logo, in which case we bowed down before it, much like the ancient Mayans did their pagan gods. We, too, thought it would never end.
Our media buyers, like Jane Trimble and Tory Friedman, tended to be small, chipper, well-dressed women who wore strong perfume and had an easy knack for conversation. They kept bags of sweets in their desk drawers and never gained any weight. They spent most of their time on the phone talking with vendors, the deadening prospect of which made us gag, and for their services, they received random gifts and tickets to sporting events, the blatant unfairness of which angered us with a blind and murderous envy. Because they put the orders in and talked with friendly inflections in their voices, they were bribed with largesse, like dirty checkpoint guards, and we thought they deserved a special ring of hell, the ring devoted to corrupt mayors, lobbyists, and media buyers. That was how we felt, anyway, during our time in the system. When one of us walked the Spanish, and got out of the system, we thought back on those loquacious and smiling media buyers as just some of the nicest people.
Our information came from reliable sources but it was only the barest details. Her surgery was scheduled for the following day. The tumor had invaded her chest wall. She was going for a full mastectomy. We had questions for her – was she scared? did she like her doctors? what were her chances of complete recover? But she had not yet said a work about it to any of us and we knew nothing of her state of mind. We might have wondered why she was at work the day before. She needed to get her priorities straight, we thought. But then one of us ever had our priorities straight. Each and every one of us harbored the illusion that the whole enterprise would go straight to hell without our individual daily contributions…Besides, what else could she do but carry on? We had to think that by coming into work the day before surgery, she was refusing to let the specter of death distract her from the ordinariness of life that could very well be both a comfort and an armament…She was exactly right to come into work the day before. Unless she should have stayed at home and ordered in and played with her cats on the sofa. It was really not for us to say.