ENCORE POST: Mr. Tee

Today is Presidents Day. And since it's a holiday, I decided to repost this piece as opposed to writing an entirely new one.

I'm doing it because I want to observe the holiday properly. Because I want to use the day to spend time with my family. And mainly because I couldn't think of anything new to write about.

I admit it's the easy way out. But if you know anything about me—and you should know almost everything by now—you know I'm all about easy.

Enough chit-chat. This post has everything: Friendship. Drama. Vegas. Rewritten parts. Spelling errors. Ready? Please to enjoy.

A few years ago, I was looking for something I could do to add on to the monumental fortune I've made in advertising. Preferably something not involving monster egos, all-night work sessions, talking to account planners and unimaginably bad pizza.

So my close friend and art director extraordinaire Kurt Brushwyler and I kicked around escape plans for a while, and came up with a business idea we could both get behind: t-shirts.

Alright, so it wasn't the most original idea. But we were going to do it in a way that managed to combine two things we loved: t-shirts and Vegas.

I forget the name of it, but for a while there was a little newsletter/brochure you could pick up at any restaurant, usually near the restrooms by the sponsored post card rack and outdated copies of the L.A. Weekly. It listed all kinds of bizarre classes that not only reinforced every stereotype about L.A., but also that no legitimate institution of learning would ever offer.

One of them was How To Get Into The T-Shirt Industry. Coincidence? I think not.

So one night after a long day freelancing at Chiat (is there any other kind?), Kurt and I hopped in his Prius and drove over to the world-famous, two-star Marina Del Rey Marriott for a three-hour class taught by guys who'd hit it big making t-shirts and selling them to Paris Hilton for $95 a piece at Kitson.

It was actually an interesting and educational evening. Needless to say the part about having to go to Vegas to hawk our wares at the Magic Fashion Convention was quite appealing.

Our master plan was to get those cart/kiosk things you see in the main promenade of The Forum Shops at Caesar's and sell the t-shirts off of them. It was going to be our test run. If they did well, we'd approach each of the casinos and holding companies about making exclusive t-shirts for their gift shops, with funny lines tailored specifically for each hotel.

I wrote about a couple hundred Vegas/hotel lines, and Kurt started working on designs for them. It was ours, and it was fun.

Right up until I called The Forum Shops to find out about the carts. Come to find out - and if I'd thought about it for a second I would've realized it - that Caesar's owned all the carts in their mall. They didn't rent them to outside vendors.

But since we both come from advertising, and are used to rejection, adversity, broken dreams and plans going awry on a daily basis, we knew exactly how to handle the situation.

We gave up.

Every once in awhile, when I talk to Kurt or we get together, we kick around rebooting the idea. But then we move on to more important things, like which sushi place to go to for lunch.

We still own the URL we came up with (no, I'm not saying it here just in case...) and still have the lines. Plus there are a whole slew of casinos that weren't there the first time around we could approach. So I'm not ruling anything out—we might come back to the idea at some point.

All I know for sure is if we do, there'll definitely be a lot of research involved.

The most important burrito of the day

One of the many benefits of being a freelancer, besides working at home in your underwear—and let's hope it's your underwear—and setting your own lunch break (mine is from noon to 4PM), is that the city is lousy with ad agencies you can choose to dial for dollars or actually work at.

It seems there are almost as many agencies as Starbucks. In fact, some of them are in Starbucks.

Anyway, when I have the luxury of deciding which ones I want to work for, there are several criteria I take into consideration before taking the gig.

First and most obvious is the caliber of the work. Is it smart, entertaining, memorable and effective. You know, like me.

Next, the caliber of people. Besides knowing what they're doing—which is far rarer than you think—are they people I want to work with, that I want with me in the trenches. I don't have to have drinks with them after work or share our deepest secrets, but I don't want to be stuck with people I can't stand for the length of the assignment.

Location, location, location. I've had offers from agencies in cities all over the place, for example New York, Detroit, San Francisco, San Diego and Bakersfield. Guess which one I said no to?

After all how many pickup trucks and country stations can a city boy take, amiright?

But it finally dawned on me there's another important factor to think about before making any employment decisions. Do they serve a breakfast burrito, and how good is it.

When I worked at Chiat, the breakfast burritos were exceptional. Dare I say even good enough to get me in to work early on occasion. Chiat has their own restaurant upstairs (note to all other agencies), so not only could I order a breakfast burrito, I could get it exactly the way I wanted it.

As an only child, having it the way I want it is something I just take for granted.

The agency I'm currently at serves breakfast to the employees once every couple weeks. Today was my lucky day—it happened to be breakfast burritos. They weren't bad, but they weren't custom either.

To make it easier, they color-coded the wrappers. The red was made with ham, the green with bacon and the black with no meat at all (that's just crazy talk).

They were cut in half like the picture, and there was hot sauce and sour cream in bowls next to them—that's about as customized as they got.

Still, since my agency's tsunami adjacent, I can look out the window at the ocean, or eat out on the patio and feel the breeze, and somehow it makes the burrito taste much better than it otherwise would.

What am I saying? Just that if you're serving a quality breakfast burrito, odds are you're going to attract a higher caliber of talent.

And if you have Taco Tuesdays, dammit, I'll sign on the line.

A little foggy on the subject

When I worked at FCB in San Francisco, I developed the very enjoyable habit of going to the San Francisco Ad Awards show every year. Not only was it a way to see the outstanding creative work being done around town, it gave me a great excuse to go up north and catch up with my many friends who live there. Sadly, the SF ad show eventually went the way of southern California’s Belding awards.

Which means I can still go see my friends, I just can’t write it off (as easily).

I remember one year, the show was being held at the historic Fillmore, where icons like Jimi Hendrix, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Muddy Waters played. You could feel history in the hall.

At this particular awards show, George Zimmer, founder and former CEO of Men’s Wearhouse, was the master of ceremonies. He made a joke wondering why all these other accounts were winning awards for their creativity but his wasn’t. I can only assume it was a rhetorical question.

Every year I went, there was the usual grousing from losing agencies about how Goodby would steal the show - much the same way people used to complain about Chiat walking off with the Beldings every year, until they changed the rules and judging criteria. Funny how sometimes entry fees speak louder than the work.

Anyway, the SF show always seemed to be a lot looser and more freewheeling.

I remember the funniest line of the night was from a presenter who starting talking about how grateful he was for his career in advertising, and then rattled off all the things he wouldn’t want to be in life.

At the top of the list was Hal Riney’s liver.

Even then it was a gutsy line. But it just speaks to the no-holds-barred fun the SF show used to be.

In a couple weeks, I'll be heading back up to go to the wedding of a good friend of mine. I'm looking forward to the wedding, the city and the feeling of possibility and originality that seems to go with it.

And if I have time, I'll catch a show at the Fillmore.

Twelve chairs

From agency to agency, as a freelancer you have to adapt to all kinds of situations: tiny workspaces, unreliable wi-fi, uncovered parking, bad agency coffee. However those are much more easily overcome than what I think is the worst mountain you’ll have to climb – the communal writing table (or its equivalent, open cubicle seating).

I just returned to an agency gig after a three-month stint on the client side. While there, I had something I haven’t had in a very long time – no, not a 32” waistline – an actual office. With a door. That closed.

Not only was it a trip down memory lane, it was also extremely helpful in shutting out the world and the noise that comes with it. It was significantly easier to concentrate on my writing, or to make that extra special personal phone call to my doctor, banker or wife.

In one form or another, besides the few actual offices with doors reserved for upper management, almost every agency today has an open seating plan. I like to blame Chiat\Day and it’s phenomenal failure, the “virtual office” experiment almost 20 years ago.

The idea was run an office like a college campus. No one had any assigned personal space. You’d come in, see the “concierge” and check out a powerbook and cell phone. You were then free to work from anywhere you liked in the office. What this lead to was petty turf wars, people scurrying for private space and a high absentee rate since you could literally phone it in from anywhere.

The thought was all this togetherness would foster a more creative, collaborative environment and improve the quality of the work.

It did neither.

The other thought was that instead of building out spaces and moving walls to accommodate titles, it'd simply be cheaper to throw everyone into the mix and let them fend for themselves.

Chiat abandoned the experiment when they moved to their current Frank Gehry-designed space in Playa Del Rey. It's wide open, but at least (most) people have desks to call their own.

Whether it's open space or communal seating, it's like trying to work in the world’s largest Starbuck’s, where 200 baristas are yelling orders and names non-stop, and it all echos off the open-ceiling, exposed duct design. Or as I like to call it, Chiat-lite.

Maybe I’m just nostalgic for a time when effort was better spent doing the work instead of trying to block everything else out so you could focus on it.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to throw these babies on and get back to it.

Writer squared

Freelancing is a lot like checking into a hotel. A really crowded hotel, with three conventions going on at the same time.

You never quite know what room, or in this case, cubicle, you're going to get.

As any freelancer will tell you, they stick you where they can. They also stick it to you where they can - usually in the wallet. But that's for another post.

The days where a hired gun could expect a spare empty window office to work in for the length of the gig are long gone. Now, they cram you into whatever space they can.

Lately I've been working in various parts of various agencies: open areas (supposedly better for creativity - total bulls@#%), the lobby, the kitchen, the (small) conference room (that I kept getting booted out of every time they had a meeting, which was every half hour because, well, it's an agency).

But there are cubicles then there are Cubicles.

The ones you see above belong to Chiat Day, and they are the most sought after workspaces in the agency. Rarely does a freelancer get to use them, although I have been lucky enough to work in them a few times while a staffer was on vacation. Everyone jockeys for these spaces, especially the ones on Main Street, which is the bottom row.

Say what you will about Chiat, aesthetically speaking it's nicer than any other agency to come into. It almost doesn't matter where they put you. There's always something to see: some interesting design or architectural detail to appreciate. And pretty people? The place is lousy with 'em.

Plus they let you bring your dog to work. There's a park. A basketball court. And a restaurant.

As far as walking into freelance gigs, I file it under "things could be worse."

Speaking of worse, a lot worse, I just finished working with an art director at an agency in Orange County. I've worked at this agency many times before, and all those other times I had an ordinary cubicle, the kind you're imagining right now. However this time, they put both of us in - well, room is too generous a word - a very narrow space about nine feet long and four feet wide. It was clearly one of those leftover spaces - not enough for an office, too much for a closet.

So it's the freelancer room.

As I broke a sweat trying to breathe while the table was smashed into me, and the chair was backed against the wall, the thing I made a point of remembering is that unlike a hotel, I'm not there for the accommodations.

I'm there for the love. Nah, just messin' with you. You know what I'm there for.

Besides, what did I really expect from an agency that thinks chairs like these are a good idea?

Clocked out

My pal Rich Siegel at Round Seventeen wrote a great post about the expectation of you working late if you work at Chiat. Which, if you've ever worked there, know is absolutely true.

But it's not only true of them.

Here's the thing: if I'd wanted to keep doctors hours, I would've been a doctor. Which would've made my parents very happy. Then, I wouldn't have had to explain what I do over and over to them. They never understood. Many times I don't either.

I didn't become a doctor for many reasons. One of which was that I didn't want to be on call at all hours of the night. I think it came right below "I'm not smart enough," "I'm not doing prostate exams," and "Who'd be stupid enough to have me as their doctor?"

I've been working on a major automotive client which shall go nameless - Toyota - that I've worked on before and enjoy.

Only this time I've been doing it through a small, virtual marketing agency that I've never worked at before. The experience has been something short of pleasant (except for the checks: that part's been very pleasant).

For some odd reason, this company is under the mistaken notion I'm on call 24/7, just waiting for their last minute copy changes. Which usually come after their last minute change in direction. The other night, I had no less than eight emails from them that arrived between 1 a.m. and 3:30 a.m.

I didn't read them until I woke up around 7 a.m. And I'm pretty sure if they'd taken a breath and thought about it, they'd have realized those emails didn't need to be sent in the middle of the night. No action was going to be taken on them (certainly not by me), and they could've gotten a good nights sleep (always thinking of others - it's my curse).

My friend Janice used to have this sign in her office:

I think I've found the Christmas card I'm sending to agencies this year.