Without so much as a word about Chris Yop’s presence among us, the input documents got handed around. Everyone took a copy; Chris Yop took a copy, too. Did he really plan to sit through the entire input meeting though he was no longer an employee? Lynn took her jacket off and flung it over her chair, sat down, and said, “Okay. Let’s get this funeral started.” She began to read from the input document. When we turned the page, Yop turned the page. It was hard to concentrate on anything else. There was Lynn, reading from the input document, and then there was Yop reading from the input document, and the one had just fired the other, but there they both were, carrying on as if nothing at all had happened. Maybe she hadn’t noticed him? Maybe she had other things on her mind?
Our project turned out to be pro bono. The agency had donated our services to a popular breast cancer fund-raising event sponsored by the Alliance Against Breast Cancer. Our job, Lynn explained, reading from the input document, was to raise awareness of the event and to boost donations across the country. We would be doing so by advertising in nationally distributed magazines and on the backs of cereal boxes.
We had to wonder, was this just a bizarre coincidence? We thought she might finally say something to us about her diagnosis. We watched her, but she never wavered from her steady reading of the input document. She gave no indication that this project was different in any way from any other project. We looked around at one another. Then we looked back down at the input document. When she was through, she explained a few extraneous matters, and then she asked us if we had any questions. We told her it sounded like a great project, and we inquired how we happened to get involved. “Oh, I know the committee chair,” she replied. “I’ve been saying no for two years and I just didn’t have the energy to say no anymore.” She shrugged. Noticing something in the corner of her eye, she turned and picked lint off the shoulder of her blouse. “Any other questions?” No one said a word. “Okay,” she said. “Funeral’s over.” And with that, we all got up and left her office. Yop almost made it out into the hall when she called him back in. “Chris,” she said, “can I have a word with you, please? Joe,” she added, “get the door on your way out, will you?” Yop turned back, downcast and hesitant. Lynn got up to draw her blinds. Yop walked back in, the door closed, and that was the last we saw of them.
We set off for our offices and cubicles, immediately leaving them again to gather in small clusters, in doorways and print stations, to discuss the almost surreal pro bono project we had on our hands. During the input she had asked us to envision a loved one being diagnosed with the disease — a wife, a mother — so that we could really sympathize with cancer sufferers and design a more effective communication. Well, she had the disease. If someone could give us insight to sympathize with the sick for a more effective communication, who better than she? And yet not a word. Everyone knew she was a private person. And we had a reputation for gossip. We didn’t expect that she would just come out and announce that she had cancer. But she was also a very dedicated marketer, and in that respect, it was perhaps odd, despite her sense of privacy, that she did not extend herself to help us better understand the horror of a diagnosis, for example, or the misery of treatments, if understanding those things were necessary for coming up with a better ad. We didn’t know if we should believe that she just happened to know some committee chair who had pestered her and pestered her until she agreed to donate our time.
She had a command of business politics like no one we had ever known. In 1997 she quarreled with Roger Highnote. He departed, and our lives improved dramatically. She was an enemy of the lowest common denominator. The cardinal rule of advertising has always been, make your communication dumb enough for an eighth grader to understand. Lynn Mason’s mentor, the fabled Mary Wells, had the fabled Bernbach as mentor, and Bernbach once said, famously, “It’s true that there’s a twelve-year-old mentality in America. Every six-year-old has it.” Like Wells and Bernbach, Lynn respected American intelligence, and a lot of good had come from it: the talking llama campaign, the Cold Sore Guy spots. Sure, she was the one walking everyone Spanish down the hall, but she hadn’t walked any of us Spanish down the hall yet — that was an important distinction.
Lynn Mason was also scrupulous as hell. Once Karen Woo and Jim Jackers were redesigning the packaging for a box of cookies made by a big conglomerate who later broke our hearts when they left us for another agency. The box was standard stuff, overanimated with recognizable cookie characters and catchy little phrases like “Chocolicious!” and “Dunkable!” in colorful arching fonts. These mandatories had to stay; they had become scripture in the client’s thick red binder of branding guidelines. So Karen and Jim’s job was pretty simple — they were just being asked to find some way to play up the cookie’s nutritional value. In an increasingly health-conscious and weight-wary world, every cookie box was doing it. So Karen wrote some copy for one of the panels that spoke to the importance of niacin and folic acid. Then she went down to Jim’s cube and stood over his computer while instructing him to write, in a smallish font near the bottom of the front of the box, “0 g of Lastive Acid.” Jim did as he was instructed.
“What’s lastive acid?” he asked.
“Not something you want in your body,” replied Karen.
They took the box down to Lynn, who looked over the changes. Practically everything was the same except for the copy box on the side panel discussing the good effects of niacin and folic acid, and Lynn was happy with that until she came to the part that read — and here she stopped reading silently and began to recite out loud — “‘And our chocolicious cookies contain zero grams of lastive acid, making them the health-conscious choice for totally dunkable snacking.’ What is lastive acid?” she inquired.
“I thought it was like a, you know,” said Karen, “something unhealthy.”
“But what is it?”
“Sounds terrible, whatever it is,” said Jim.
“It’s probably not something you want in your body,” said Karen, “from the sound of it. Lastive acid. Sounds like it would stay with you longer than the formaldehyde.”
Meanwhile Lynn had gone searching through the input document provided by the accounts people. “I don’t see anything about ‘lastive acid’ in here,” she said, gazing at Karen.
“No, I came up with it,” said Karen.
Lynn’s face, which had aged into the early years of her forties with little modification of her cool detached beauty, was architecturally designed for such outrageous confessions. Her high cheekbones kept her eyes buttressed from the collapse of a disbelieving brow, her nearly crow’s-feet-free eyes never gave way to an off-putting squint, and her mouth, flanked on both sides by a single parenthesis of a gently etched laugh line, remained in perfect equipoise when presented with revelations that would have provoked in lesser professionals fallen jaws of slackened disgust or a steady stream of rebuke. She simply gazed across the desk at Karen and asked soberly, “You just made it up?”
“Well, not the part about there being zero grams.”
“Karen,” she said — and Jim told us later that the only show of irritation she allowed herself was to pull her chair closer to her desk and to place two fingers at her left temple.
“I was trying to think out of the box,” explained Karen.
“I . . . myself, Lynn, I didn’t know . . .” Jim stammered.
Lynn shifted her focus briefly to address him. “Jim, will you excuse us for a minute, please?”
It was this sort of thing that showed us how Lynn had developed over the years a moral principle that guided her in the practice of advertising, which she abided by with strict authority. We respected her for it and wanted to live up to those high standards. Whenever we did something thoughtless or dull, or when we didn’t perform at the level we had hoped to on one project or another, we would, in our own individual ways, try to hint to her that we were just as disappointed in ourselves as she was while implying that we were making every effort to improve. Failin
g, perhaps, to pick up on these subtle apologies — not wanting to advertise our shortcomings, we rarely came right out and admitted them — she usually didn’t respond, but when she did, her communiqués were brief, inconclusive, and often bewildering. She might leave us a voice mail that said, “Forget about it,” or drop an e-mail that said only, “Don’t worry so much — Lynn.” We spent hours trying to decode these simple messages. We went into other people’s offices, demanded they stop what they were doing, and conscripted them into the ceaseless political labors of puzzling out her woefully inadequate responses to our pleas for reassurance. “Don’t worry so much?” we asked each other. “Why not at all?” We wanted to ask her directly but no one dared, except Jim Jackers, whose insatiable demand for confirmation that he wasn’t a hopelessly unreformed boob sent him into Lynn’s office with the regularity of therapist appointments. Where she found the time, and why she had a soft spot for Jim, were mysteries on the order of her gnomic e-mails, and someone’s absurd suggestion that she might be just as receptive to any of the rest of us if we only had the nerve to knock at her door was dismissed as sadly out of touch.
So she wasn’t going to say anything to us about her diagnosis. We were disturbed and upset and at a bit of a loss. We wanted her to open up, if only for ten minutes. What were we here for if not, on occasion, that? Just work? We hoped not. Yet we got nothing. Not even for the sake of a better ad. We still had no official word that she would be out of the office while recuperating from surgery. Officially, she’d be in all week, and when the time came, we’d be expected to show her ad concepts for what she had sold to us as a pain-in-the-ass fund-raiser she had been pestered into doing against her will.
2
MORNINGS — BENNY’S CHALLENGE — WHO IS JOE POPE? — CARL GARBEDIAN — THE FIRST INTERRUPTION — KAREN WOO WEIGHS IN — TAKE ME HOME — THE SECOND INTERRUPTION — THE JOE POPE DOLL — A BETTER STORY THAN THIS ONE — BENNY UPLOADS — BRIZZ’S BEQUEST TO BENNY — WALKING BLITHELY PAST BRIZZ — TOM’S GIFT TO CARL — CARL’S CONFESSION — TOM’S “ANGER” — GOD IN THE WORKPLACE — COLD SORE GUY — THE WRITING ON THE WALL
THE BEST TIME WAS always early in the morning. Mornings had going for them the quiet in the hallways, the lights not yet at full capacity, and a forestalled sense of urgency. It was the worst time, too, because of the anticipation of the end of those things.
We liked to gather in Benny’s office. He came back with a full mug and said, “So yesterday —”
We could hardly look at him. “What?” he said. We told him he had something — “Where?” It was on his lip. He went searching. It was on the other side. We hoped to god he would find it soon. Finally he thumbed it off and looked at it. “Cream cheese,” he said. There were bagels? “In the kitchen,” he replied. Benny’s story would have to wait for those of us wanting bagels. Those of us more interested in his story stuck around. “All right, so yesterday,” he resumed, “I wanted to see if I could go the entire day without touching my mouse or my keyboard.” He settled himself with constrained gusto into his chair, careful not to spill. “The whole day without touching my mouse or my keyboard — impossible, right? I mean, how many times a day do we use those two things? If you’re like me and you’re putting an ad together, you’re clicking or keying maybe ten thousand times a day. Twenty thousand. I don’t even know, I never counted. The point is, a lot of times. You start to think your whole life is slowly clicking away. So I decided yesterday, what if I could go the whole day? What do I have to do? I have to click and open, click and drag, click and color, click and align, click and resize, click and drop-shadow —”
He went on and on, using his chubby fingers to count off.
“Then there’s keyboard functions, right? Control-x, control-c, control-v, control-f —”
We told him to get on with it. We liked wasting time, but almost nothing was more annoying than having our wasted time wasted on something not worth wasting it on.
“So listen to how I did it,” said Benny, his dough face smiling wryly.
“You did no work all day long,” said Marcia.
“Not true,” Benny objected, suddenly uncharacteristically solemn. “I had things to give Joe, I had deadlines. I had to use my mouse and my keyboard yesterday. So listen to how I did it.”
So Benny told us the story of how he went the entire day without clicking by teaching Roland how to use Photoshop. Roland said he didn’t think he could learn Photoshop, he had never even been to college. But Benny told him that was crazy talk. What with the right instructor, it wouldn’t take more than a couple hours. Roland worked for security. He stood watch at the front desk in the downstairs lobby, or else he trolled the perimeter of the building in his security guard’s generic navy suit coat. All day long he sat at his lonely lobby post or he went back and forth around the building on his aching feet. To sit in an office with Benny would be a pleasure. The only stipulation he gave Benny was that if he got chirped on the Motorola by Mike Boroshansky, chief of security, he’d probably have to go. We expected so little from security in those days.
“So what I want to know,” Benny had said to him, “is which one of these photos do you think works best for this ad?” Roland looked at Benny’s screen and said, “I don’t know. That one?” and Benny said, “Come on, Roland, man — you have over a thousand photos to choose from up there, and you’ve looked at a total of six. Scroll down, man! Click through.” So Roland ended up clicking through about an hour’s worth of stock photos while Benny sat off to the side mouse-free. It was a pleasure for Roland — good company and a cushioned seat. “No, not that one,” Benny kept saying. “You don’t have much of an artistic intuition, Roland, no offense.” “Hey, Benny,” Roland said defensively, “I didn’t go to school for this or anything, if you don’t mind.” But still he clicked to the next page, and scrolled down, and clicked to the next page and scrolled down. Whenever Roland came across a photo Benny liked, Benny wrote down its reference number on a Post-it. When he had enough reference numbers, he kicked Roland out of his office and called the rep from the stock house and they messengered over the thumbnails for him to choose from. That’s when he went to lunch. Then, when he got back from the Potbelly and it was time to start putting the ad together, he picked up the phone and called down to security and asked for Roland.
When Roland returned to Benny’s office, he was only more than happy to be back there giving his feet a rest. “You know how many miles a day I walk around in this building?” he asked Benny. “How many?” said Benny. “I don’t know,” he said. “I never counted.” “You should get one of those pedometers,” said Benny. Two hours later they had finished the rough layout of an ad Joe Pope needed first thing in the morning. Benny’s moratorium on clicking would be over by the morning, and he could put the finishing touches on the ad then. So that’s how he did it. The whole day and not one click for Benny. Except he ruined it at a quarter to five when he allowed himself to check numbers on fantasy baseball.
“You know,” said Amber Ludwig, “I don’t find this story very amusing. What if Tom Mota comes back here and one of our security guys is inside your office putting an ad together?” she asked. “I’m so sure that makes me feel real safe, Benny.”
“Oh, Amber,” said Benny. “Tom Mota’s not coming back here.”
Suddenly Joe Pope appeared in Benny’s doorway. “Morning,” he said.
“Oh!” Amber shrieked instinctively, gripping her pregnant belly. She wasn’t showing, we shouldn’t have known the first thing about it, but we did because we knew everything. “Oh, Joe,” she cried. “You scared me!”
“Sorry,” said Joe. He stood in the doorway with his right pant leg still cuffed against the threat of grease. Joe Pope rode his bicycle into work on all but the most inclement days. Most mornings he came up the elevator like a courier with his sleek fluorescent helmet and his cuffed leg and his daypack. He walked the bike down to his office and parked it against the wall. Then he locked the front tire to the frame.
Inside the office he did that, locked his bicycle, like he was beset on all sides by thieves and barbarians. That bicycle was the only personal item in Joe Pope’s office. He had no posters, postcards, doodads, snow globes, souvenirs, framed pictures, art reproductions, mementos, no humor books on the shelves and nothing to clutter his desk. He had been in that office three years, and it still looked temporary. Every day we had to wonder — who the hell was this Joe Pope, anyway? It wasn’t that we had anything against him. It was just that he was maybe an inch shorter than he should have been. He listened to weird music. We didn’t know what he did on the weekends. What sort of person showed up on Monday and had no interest in sharing what transpired during the two days of the week when one’s real life took place? His weekends were long dark shadows of mystery. In all likelihood, he spent his days off in the office, cultivating his master plan. Mondays we’d come in refreshed and unsuspecting and he would already be there, ready to spring something on us. Maybe he never left. Certainly he never came around with a coffee mug to palaver with us on a Monday morning. We didn’t judge him for that, so long as he didn’t judge us for our custom of easing into a new workweek.
When he did come around, it was only to say things like “Sorry to interrupt, Benny, but did you happen to put that ad together for me yesterday?”
“Got it right here, Joe,” trumpeted Benny, with a sly wink in our direction as he handed over Roland’s handiwork.
Then We Came to the End Page 5