Ad Nomad

by Eric Jay Sonnenschein

  Blinsky’s improbable appearance now punctuated and explained the Mentos disaster. It was cosmic retribution for how Dane had treated Blinsky. Yet, now he could make amends.

  At the green light, Dane rolled slowly down the street after the lumbering figure with the bags until he was a few yards in front of him. He pulled up to the curb, jumped out of the car, and met face to face with the man who had not come to dinner.

  “Ivan Blinsky?”

  The man’s eyes bulged much like Blinsky’s but were devoid of recognition and full of fear. Dane was oblivious to these warning signs and continued to unburden his troubled heart.

  “I remember your donuts, Ivan. I appreciated them, too, even though I don’t like donuts. Your generosity inspired me. Now I see what you went through. I know how it feels to give and give only to get taken. I’m so sorry if I offended you, Ivan!”

  “I’m not Ivan and I don’t know what you’re talking about!” the man cried. “Just leave me alone!”

  Dane peered through the darkness at his interlocutor, who was not Blinsky but an albino man frequently seen walking a small, black dog in the neighborhood.

  “Here! Take the money!” the albino dog-owner cried. “Just stop talking!”

  The frightened man dropped bills on the pavement and fled, as recommended by police mugging guidelines. Dane was stunned by this reaction. Had he cultivated a criminal aura by violating the natural corporate order? He noticed a police car idling a few blocks away, so he dashed to his car and sped away.

  He found street parking with miraculous speed, only to sit in the car for a half hour, steeling himself before going home. He was so full of regret that he needed to discharge it in stages. First, he phoned the headhunter who had set up the Mentos job to apologize for being fired in less than three months, thus forfeiting her commission. She forgave him and surmised that Mentos let him go to avoid paying her. The recruiter added that Mentos must be a tough place to work since they always needed people.

  When Dane told Becky the news, she told him not to worry; he’d find something else. She added that she was glad he no longer had to drive so much. Dane felt somewhat better. When he tucked Iris in for the night, she asked if his not working meant they wouldn’t go on vacation, which made Dane’s guilt flare anew.

  A few days later as an act of contrition, Dane brought the car to the dealership service center for maintenance. He needed to spend money responsibly to absolve his immature behavior. The dealership service department was a great place for penance-spending since repairs routinely cost six hundred dollars. The mechanic found metal wedged in Dane’s front tire near the inner tube. If that shard had penetrated a millimeter deeper, the mechanic said, a highway blowout would have occurred and Dane would have been injured or dead.

  Dane and Becky viewed this as a sign that his Mentos firing was good luck. But Dane’s remorse lingered. He reflected on Goldfarb’s warning. How could he keep moving from job to job? Worse, what if he could not find another one?

  AD NOMAD 6

  UNDER A COLONIAL POWER

  Case 6-A

  A NEW FRONTIER

  1. MID-CAREER CRISIS

  The eighty mile commute was no longer on his agenda but Dane’s confidence was a wreck.

  This termination was his worst; his first old-fashioned sacking. He was no longer an innocent victim of random job-kill and his misbehavior would cost him thousands in lost wages. Even the Labor Department might deny him unemployment benefits for being fired with cause.

  Mentos was a black hole in his career, two unmentionable months yielding an incriminating secret. Dane had omitted jobs from his résumé because their brevity might denigrate his dedication, but insubordinate outbursts were corporate crimes. No one must know he was a hothead who ranted at account people—until they learned it for themselves.

  Dane wondered if he would work again. The experimental phase of his career had passed when he could job-hop with impunity because he was inexperienced and full of potential. His frequent moves could no longer be viewed as missteps of a free spirit seeking a home but as the mayhem of a depraved corporate orphan unlikely to find one.

  He once envied copywriters with five years of experience as specified in job listings. Now that he was one of them, experience should have been a precious ally but it wasn’t. Advertising was a compromise, so why did his quest for security leave him twisting?

  Recoiling from uncertainty, he dove into the nostalgia of his university files. There, he pored over lecture notes and talks he had delivered to colleagues who acclaimed his eloquence and erudition. He discovered his essay on the American Frontier—a personal treasure. Niche and Nichelessness explored the impact of the westward expansion on the American psyche, a topic apparently irrelevant to his current predicament, but which spoke to him now like wind on the prairies. Was he not a restless pioneer who refused to settle when his freedom was threatened?

  Why had he ever left the university life? There he was appreciated. Dane did some career math: he had one teaching job for ten years; not one advertising job for even two. His next move was apparent: return to academia and write off advertising as a spastic detour.

  Just then, Dane found the jewel of his academic career—his one publication in the university’s peer-reviewed journal, Episteme. He turned the magazine’s textured pages until he came to the title page of Humbaba and the War in Iraq: Gilgamesh Revisited with his by-line across the top. He read the piece ecstatically until he made a ghastly discovery.

  The last two lines of his academic chef d’oeuvre were deleted! One sentence dangled with no predicate—like a severed head—and the last sentence was omitted entirely. The power of his argument was wasted, his masterpiece destroyed. At first, Dane suspected his own absent-mindedness but he located the hard copy in his files and it was impeccable. Through incompetence or spite, his university colleagues had polluted his academic posterity!

  Dane’s teaching nostalgia was officially over at that moment. He had been a talented and dedicated instructor but the fate of his scholarly masterpiece was a bitter memento of the disrespect and poverty that plagued his academic career.

  Instinct urged him to shun personal reflection even if it was the turnpike to truth. Truth was out of his price range. He must aim at a more accessible target—the next job.

  2. VOICE OF REDEMPTION

  Throughout this career free fall, Dane heard a small voice in his head. It belonged to Albert Griffin, his first headhunter. Dane recalled that Griffin had sent his book to another agency when he accepted the Mentos job.

  Dane dialed Griffin’s number with trepidation. In their most recent chat, the recruiter had slammed the phone on Dane for grabbing the Mentos job while declining an interview Albert arranged for him with a Canadian agency. While Dane pleaded financial duress, Griffin accused Dane of selling out for a soul-killing, timewasting, career-annihilating dead-end in of all places, Winton, CT! In retrospect, Griffin was right—but did such an admission come too late?

  “Hey, Albert, it’s Dane,” he said.

  “The Connecticut nutmeg!”

  “I’m not in Connecticut,” Dane replied.

  Griffin was silent. Dane closed his eyes and cringed.

  “I can’t believe you called,” the recruiter said with his trademark hush of excitement. “You won’t believe this. The Canadians still haven’t filled that copywriter position. Do I have your book?”

  “You submitted it,” Dane said.

  “Oh…Right.”

  “But I want to include some great stuff I did in Connecticut,” Dane added.

  “Great! Be here by five o’clock and I’ll send it tonight,” Griffin demanded. “This is hot. They loved your book three months ago. They’ll love it even more now.”

  Dane was paranormal about doom. However, a greater force seemed to be working now in his behalf. How often did an opportunity linger for months? As he raced to Albert’s office, he cried out in the street an improvised headline of thanks, “From the
depths of Mentos, redemption is heaven-sentos!”

  3. HORIZONTAL MANAGEMENT

  It was a splendid day in late April when Dane interviewed at the offices of Georgian Shield, an award-winning Canadian agency, located in the Dole, Osborn and Adelman building, the cradle of advertising’s golden age.

  Georgian Shield was an award-winning subsidiary of DOA Worldwide, the last advertising network with a Madison Avenue address. Dane viewed this interview as a commentary on his ability—and ascendancy. He was vying for a senior creative position at the agency that epitomized creativity; that told the world to dream in color and to invite a dog to dinner; where Goldfarb was once a proud professional before his groveling and pandering period. The best part was that Dane felt he belonged here. Despite his professional pratfalls, Dane retained the swagger of an advertising genius of global stature. He believed he was an opinionated maverick who put an imprint on all he did and raised the quality of everyone around him—and was prepared to say so during his interview.

  Merely doing business in this hallowed landmark signified success. In the marble atrium even security guards had class. Dane did not wait in line for a galoot in a bad blazer to ask for ID and to call his party. A pretty woman in a short skirt, with long, black-hosed legs crossed on a high stool, flashed a smile, asked Dane to speak his name into a camera and wished him luck like she knew he really needed it.

  This was how advertising was meant to be, Dane mused. This made all of the compromises, mediocrity, sucking-up, idea theft, interminable hours and insufferable meetings half-bearable. At least here you were pandering somewhere, not in a pre-fab, rehab, glass-and-concrete complex at the nexus of two interstates between a Pathmark and a wetland.

  As Dane emerged from the elevator, a wall-sized monitor assaulted his eyes with a Cannes award-winning commercial produced by the Brazilian office of the most creative network on the planet. Dane watched women in thongs doing a samba on Volkswagens while shooting water cannons at SUVs. Dane knew he would never contribute to such “killer,” award-winning work, but being close to it might enhance his creativity via mental osmosis.

  Managers at Georgian Shield took pride in their award-winning horizontal interview process. In retrospect, Dane thought the process was called horizontal because it left the candidate horizontal—from exhaustion. Yet it was an effective way of giving everyone ownership of the hiring of new colleagues to ensure the best fit. Dane was slated to meet several key people. Dane’s first interviewers were Juan and Jeremi. Juan, a short, nasal art supervisor, described how uplifting it was to shoot commercials for a drug that gave hope to dying cancer patients. Jeremi, a large, scowling woman, told Dane what it meant to grow up in Muskatoon, Manitoba where sheep herded down Main Street and they called it a parade. Juan and Jeremi nodded at Dane’s book without comment.

  Then Rupert McIntosh, the head of the New York office, a dapper man with a goatee, discussed his career and last year’s Thanksgiving turducken, before describing the job for which Dane was considered. It would feature frequent trips to the client’s corporate headquarters in Luxembourg and research sessions in Singapore, Paraguay and Zimbabwe because it was vital to learn how gastroenterologists worldwide felt about prosthetic rectums.

  Dane was gang-interviewed for six hours by ten people, including a global strategist, an office manager, an intern, two accountant executives, a receptionist, a mailroom worker, a deli deliveryman, a cleaning lady and a newly-hired art director named Ron, who sat in a dark office and spat organic sunflower seeds into a green waste basket because he heard it benefited both his prostate and the environment. Ron had no clue why he was interviewing Dane, so Dane asked himself questions and answered them, while Ron watched with tentative amusement.

  By the fifth hour, Dane was depleted. He had been offered no refreshment and his brain had used up the caffeine from his morning coffee. He strained to listen to his interviewers, to present his work and to explain his wispy ponytail. Meanwhile, the award-winning office manager chose not to bring Dane the bottled water she promised in order to test his reaction to adversity. It was all part of the award-winning Yucca Flats candidate assessment process.

  Finally, a short man with a red mustache bounded into the room. His face was ruddy and perspiration droplets rolled down his hypertensive cheeks. This was the award-winning creative director from Canada. He shook Dane’s hand.

  “Ay. Dane. Nigel Hogbine here—there…and everywhere. Ho! Ha! Sawrry. I use Beatles’ references as mood-freshener. Good meeting you. You’ve got a great science bag,” he said.

  Bag? That must have been the Canadian word for “book” or portfolio.

  To put Dane at ease, Nigel Hogbine told him he had been voted the student in his senior class most likely to resemble his name.

  Dane’s look of astonishment prompted Nigel to explain. “I s’pose they thought I looked like a hog. Ha! Ha! The laugh was on them, ay? My family’s name wasn’t originally Hogbine. They changed it from Hawriceck. My father thought Hogbine had class!” Dane chuckled nervously as Nigel flipped through his book. The creative director went “Ummm” several times and closed it. “Like I said the first five times I saw it: first-rate work. So let me tell you about us. Georgian Shield is the number one creative shop in Canada. Now we have clients in the States. We need the best talent we can find. Thanks for coming in.”

  Nigel shook Dane’s hand and left the room as fast as he entered. When Dane left the DOA building, he had no job.

  “You’re their guy,” Griffin gushed the next day. “It’s between you and another guy.”

  “If I’m the guy, who’s this other guy?” Dane asked.

  “There’s always another guy. Sit tight. You’ve got the inside track.”

  Dane went through a book of stamps sending “Thank you” letters to everyone who interviewed him and waited. Two weeks later Griffin called. “Don’t tell your wife but I heard unofficially you’re their man…the favorite…you’ve got the lead along the rail on the homestretch.”

  “Ye-e-e-e-e!” Dane whinnied skeptically.

  “If you take a job on a cruise line I’ll kill you,” Griffin said.

  “I won’t.”

  “This is big. Georgian Shield is a subsidiary of the most prestigious agency network in the world. They just won the Ad Council Award of Newfoundland. The fact that they like you means you’re an international star. Don’t blow it.”

  “I won’t,” Dane said. But he wasn’t sure what there was to blow.

  4. LAST HURDLE

  A month had passed since Dane’s gang-interview. Albert Griffin phoned Dane every week to remind him he was their man, he had the inside lane of the fast track and the job was his to lose.

  Still nothing happened.

  Then, one unemployed Monday when Dane wondered if he should buy life insurance and have himself killed over a parking space, Albert Griffin phoned.

  “What did I tell you? They’re making you an offer,” Griffin said. “They would have made it sooner but they didn’t think they could pay you.”

  “Did you tell them I work for food?” Dane said.

  “You do but I don’t,” Griffin said.

  Later that afternoon, Griffin left a message. The offer would be faxed.

  No fax came. Dane was losing hope when Griffin called.

  “The president and executive vice president want to meet you in a two-way-no-holds-barred web-chat. Tomorrow at noon at the Madison Avenue offices.”

  The next day, Dane sat on the tenth floor of the most prestigious agency network in the world. On a large monitor, two Canadian men, one rotund, the other youthful and fit, fired questions about his hobbies.

  “So, Dane, play hockey?” The fit man asked.

  “No.”

  “Knock-hockey?” The rotund man asked.

  “Not recently.”

  “Hmmm. Do you skate at all?”

  “Poorly. But I swim.”

  “Very good! Well, thank you for coming in.”

  Dan
e left the cradle of advertising despondently, believing he had blown the interview. Why was he honest about not playing hockey, the Canadian national sport? And who swam in Canada but seals and polar bears?

  Later that afternoon, Griffin called. “So how did you do?”

  “Okay. But I don’t know.”

  “You did great. They just sent over the offer.”

  Dane fell to the floor in abject gratitude for this sixth or seventh chance. His Connecticut debacle was rectified and he would again provide for his family. He was working in New York at a Canadian subsidiary of a multinational corporation. Life was worth living after all.

  Case 6-B

  GROWTH FACTORS

  5. ADVERTISING JUST HOW HE PICTURED IT

  After six weeks Dane had the Georgian Shields job. It came with an office on Madison Avenue, no less—in the heart of Manhattan, a block away from Rockefeller Center.

  Dane always fantasized what it would be like to have a great career and get up each morning, loving his life because his work mattered. Finally, he was in the world, not clinging to the rim of a spinning centrifuge that flung unwanted souls like flecks of spit.

  The horizon line where reality met expectation, where images and ideas evoked by a phrase like “Madison Avenue” matched the experience, were rare—and this was it.

  This job, this office, this building, this window, this street enveloped Dane. He even imbibed creativity from the DOA office ventilation. His humble gratitude for this miraculous career boost evolved into more grandiose emotions. Ensconced in his Golden Age of Advertising office, in a position that waited for him for months, Dane’s gut, which had been silent since Dane scolded it during his hallucinations at UNIHEALTH months ago, now told him that fate had fingered him for a higher purpose.