gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards"

watercooler

"Watercooler"

Back when I worked for a large advertising agency as a young rookie, it used to just bother me how much the "Watercooler Gang" just kvetched all the time. The "Watercooler Gang" was my term for what was still allowed to exist in the industry back then. Packs of second-rate creatives, many years passed their sell-by date, being squeezed by the Creative Directors for every last ounce of juice they had, till it came time to firing them on the cheap. Taking too many trips to the watercooler and coming back drunk from lunch far too often. Working late nights and weekends on all the boring-but-profitable accounts. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze…

I remember some weeks where one could easily spend half an hour a day, listening to Ted complain.

Ted used to have a window office but now had a cube ever since that one disastrous meeting with Client X. He would come visit me in my cube at least once a day and start his thing. Complain, complain, complain... about whatever… how Josh-The-Golden-Boy was a shit writer and a complete phoney... or how they bought Little-Miss-Hot-Pant's ad instead of his, "even though mine was the best in the room and every bastard there knew it."

Like I said, whatever.

It was endless...Yak Yak Yak… Oi vey! Ted I love ya, you're a great guy but shut up the hell up…

In retrospect it was Ted's example that taught me a very poignant lesson- back then I was still too young and naïve to have learned it by that point- that your office could be awash with Clio's and One Show awards, yet your career could still be down the sink-hole.

Don't get me wrong- my career there was a complete disaster. This is not a case of one of the Alpha's mocking the Beta's. This is a Gamma mocking the Betas.

I'm having lunch with my associate, John, who's about the same age as me. Cheap and cheerful Thai food, just down the road from the agency.

"I gotta get out of this company," I say.

"I thought you liked your job," says John.

"I do," I say. "But the only reason they like having me around is because I'm still young and cheap. The minute I am no longer either… I'm dead meat."

"Like Ted," says John.

"Yeah… him and the rest of The Watercooler Gang."

"The Watercoolies," laughs John.

So we had a good chuckle about our poor, hapless elders. We weren't that sympathetic, frankly. Their lives might have been hell then, but they had already had their glory moments. They had won their awards, flown off to The Bahamas to shoot toilet paper ads with famous movie stars and all that. Unlike us young'uns. John and I had only been out of college a couple of years and had still yet to make our mark on the industry we had entered with about as much passion and hope as anybody alive.

We had sold a few newspaper ads now and then, some magazine spreads, but the TV stuff was still well beyond reach. So far the agency we had worked for had yet to allow us to shine. Was this our fault or theirs? Maybe a little bit of both, but back then it was all "their fault, dammit!" Of course, everything is "their fault, dammit" when you're 24.

I quit my job about a year later. John stayed on with the agency for whatever reason, then about 5 years ago got married, with his first kid following soon after. Suddenly with a family to support he couldn't afford to get fired. The Creative Director knew this and started to squeeze.

"You don't mind working this weekend, John, do you? Good. I knew you wouldn't. We all know how much the team relies on you to deliver at crunch time- that's why we value you so highly, John, wouldn't you say?"

Last time I saw John he was working at this horrible little agency for a fraction of his former salary. Turns out the big agency had tossed him out about a week after his kid's second birthday.

We're sitting there at the Thai restaurant again, having lunch for old time's sake. We're having a good time, talking about the usual artsy-fartsy stuff we always do. It's a great conversation, marred only by the fact that I can't get the word "watercooler" out of my goddamn head…

Posted by hugh macleod at April 9, 2004 6:13 PM | TrackBack