Skrip - tyur' - i - ent: adj. Possessing the violent desire to write.

5/25/2006

#126 In which our hero quits his job (part IV)

To recap my experience in junk mail: I didn’t like my boss and I didn’t like the work. But I could have honestly gotten past those two things (I have certainly worked for asshats in the past doing jobs I hate) and maybe even really excelled in the direct mail world, except for the biggest hurdle, the one I just could not get past:

Thing #3: Myself

I didn’t want to do it. No matter how hard I tried to motivate myself, I ultimately could not muster much of an interest in the hard core direct mail world. And to really excel in this kind of writing (as in most of any kind of writing) you have to really love it. You have to be all over it, pushing yourself, striving to improve, clawing your way to the top of the heap.

My heart just wasn’t in it.

And to be fair to my boss, I think he really wanted to help me improve in the field. He was forever forwarding DM-related emails to me, and cutting out articles, and bringing in books for me to read.

Many, many books.

My boss had no formal training in writing, and it was clear that everything he knew (or thought he knew) he picked up from the massive DM writing library he had assembled. I gotta give the guy credit, he did due diligence in reading the materials that are out there. And there are NO shortage of books on how to write strong direct mail. Day one he made me buy a book (this one, if you’re interested) and read it cover to cover.

A little aside here: I don’t think you can learn to write from reading books. No more than you can learn to drive from reading Motor Trend. If that were so, my boss would have been a fucking DM genius. No, I think you need to actually write to get it right (ha, ha), preferable under the guidance of a more experienced writer. I had the benefit of being second copywriter to a very smart, very accessible guy in my first real writing job, and it benefited me hugely (thanks, Andy). And that was probably my biggest issue in my relationship with my boss: he wanted to help me, to guide me... but, shit, how seriously can you take the advice of a guy who can’t write a simple letter without it being full of grammatical mistakes and misspellings?

So, anyway, I was obviously resistant to trudging through a library full of books in the hopes that some “nugget of information” (my boss used this term all the time, and it still makes my skin crawl just to type it) would stick in my head. I told him that I didn’t really learn that way (by reading) and that I’d learn better by just doing.

And again, to be fair, his advice was to grab a bunch of the DM samples we had laying around and take them home and rewrite them. This was actually great advice, and it would have been a great way for me to learn.

But, again, my heart wasn’t in it. I suffered through the day doing this stuff I didn’t like for a man I didn’t like, and then he wanted me to take home books to read and finish homework assignments? Fuck that.

Did this make me a bad employee? Yeah, pretty much.

One morning I came in to find that my boss had lined up twenty (20) books on my desk. He wanted me to read them all. The problem (other than my apathy) was that most of them were so old as to be obsolete. My boss even admitted that, picking up a few and saying, “This one probably doesn’t really apply, but you might be able to pick up a few nuggets from it.” Ugh.

Looking back, it’s clear that it was much more me, than him. My boss needed someone excited about DM, someone young and impressionable that would unquestionable do and read what he was told, someone who was invested in the company.

That wasn’t me.

At one point, my boss suggested that instead of reading the newspaper during lunch, I should pick up the phone and start calling people. Who? I asked. Prospects. Leads. People we’ve done business with before. Just get your name out there. Hustle it a bit.

Clearly, he needed a salesman who could write well. I’m no salesman, far from it. I hate that shit. I just wanted to take a quiet lunch, but my boss was the kind of guy who thinks you’re on all the time, 24 hours a day. He would strike up a conversation in the elevator and end up giving the guy his card. Waiting in line for the train, he'd ask random people what they did for a living. These are good salesman tactics, I suppose, but are pure poison to me.

Oh, I should mention that in addition to a salesman, he needed a receptionist as well. He was running a repair business out of the same suite of offices, and all the calls rang through the same phone system. As he was often out of the office doing God-knows-what, and the one tech employed by the repair business was out doing house calls, I was left to answer the phone. And, y’know, I was happy to get a steady paycheck and all, but it chapped my ass more than a little to have some bozo on the phone holler at me because the repairman was late.

But again, I did try. At first. I really tried to motivate myself. Of course, the biggest motivator was money. Not only my salary (which was way shitty, honestly) but the promise of commission.

Now, commission for a copywriter is unheard of. Agencies just don’t work that way. Account people get commission, creatives don’t (I’ve bitched about that here). My boss set it up so that I would get a cut of all the money that was generated by the agency once we hit a certain level. This had the potential to make me a lot of money, and my boss told me that he was confident that he could get me to six figures in three years.

Six figures? I’d never made anything close to that. The prospect was very exciting. So I tried, imaging just what I could do for my family with that kind of money. We could live a very comfortable life without having to worry about money all the time. Private schools for my kids, more horse shows for my wife, bigger and better toys for myself.

(In the seven months I was there, I never made any commission, by the way. The one month in which we did make our nut, some creative bookkeeping on my bosses part kept my commission check at $0. I figure he screwed me out of about $2000.)

I’m not saying I tried as hard as I could, but I tried as hard as my crushing apathy and disinterest allowed. But something happened after I had been there about four months: I got a call from my old boss.

Not the jackass boss of the job that most recently laid me off, but the guy I worked for in the agency that employed me when I first moved to Cleveland. I loved this guy… he was the best boss I’ve ever had in any job. Yeah, he fired me, putting into motion that chain of events that found me worked in a shitty junk mail job, but he didn’t seem like he wanted to at the time, and after three years, all was forgiven.

It wasn’t for a job, he was just looking for some freelance help. As part of the junk mail job I had to sign a non-compete agreement that forbade me from taking any freelance work (which was bullshit in and of itself) but something very important came from that call:

I was out.

Gone. Kaput. At the moment I got a call from someone working in the real advertising industry, I mentally checked out from the DM world once and for all. I was working in this job I didn’t like first and foremost because I couldn’t find a job at a traditional agency. Now that the door to that world seemed to open a crack, I started sprinting to the light as fast as I could.

But no-one was hiring then. But after a total of seven months there, I got another call. A very important call. THE call, you might say. The HR manager of a big agency found my resume on monster.com and contacted me, asked if I was interested in coming in for an interview. Needless to say, I was.

I interviewed there three times and after much fretting and nail-biting on my part, I finally got the offer. It was one of the greatest phone calls I’ve ever received.

So ended my long, dark exile in the land of junk mail. I hope to never return.

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