Ready? Set? Wait.

Here are two things you need to know about Rich Siegel, proprietor and managing editor of Round Seventeen: First, he'll be very happy I started this post with a link to his blog. Second, he's away camping - as Jews do - and reposting pieces he's written while he's away. So yesterday, I took a page from his blog and did the same thing. It went pretty well. So even though I'm not away camping (my idea of camping is a hotel without cable), or out of town, in solidarity with my vacationing friend and colleague I'm going to take the week and revisit the classics. And by classics, I mean posts you may have missed, forgotten or wish you'd forgotten. The more cynical of you might think it's an easy way out of having to come up with a bunch of new posts this week. Shhhhhh! Have a gander at this one, originally posted April 4, 2011.

My friend Janice, a swell writer with a blog of her own, used to have this sign in her office. I think she hoped it would work as a deterrent.

But she knew better. After all, she worked in an advertising agency.

Hurry up and wait is standard operating procedure at virtually every agency I’ve ever worked at. It usually falls somewhere between their mantra and their mission statement.

The philosophy manifests itself in several forms, and when it strikes it can happen quicker than Charlie Sheen going from $2 mil a week to zero.

The way it usually begins is they - you know, “they” - hastily assemble a team of whoever happens to be unlucky enough to be in the building.

Everyone is quickly gathered in a conference room that hasn’t been cleaned since the Eisenhower administration, and wreaks with the sweet perfume of cold cuts and bagels.

Serious as a heart attack, they brief everyone with the few threadbare morsels of information they got from a casual conversation with the client. Then they send everyone scrambling to do work that has to be presented in two days.

Two days! 48 hours!

“We’re pulling out all the stops on this one people!”

"This is our chance to make a real impact!"

"We won't have this chance again so it has to count!"

So, everyone puts on their thinking caps and scrambles.

And even though we cry like babies and complain like Rosie O'Donnell when the buffet is closed, we’re all professionals. After a round-the-clock coffee, pizza and cynicism fueled night, we deliver everything that’s been asked for: tv spots, web site, emails, print, radio scripts. The whole shootin’ match.

We present our work to extremely non-committal reactions, then wait to hear.

And wait.

And wait.

Oh, the meeting got pushed back? So you didn’t need it in two days? Uh huh.

Ah, and the client’s not sure he really has the budget to do the program? Huh. Might’ve been a good question to ask up front.

So you want us to wait, and you’ll get back to us on next steps.

Okay. We'll wait here.

What’s that you say? Maybe we can think about it some more until you decide what comes next.

Yeah. We'll get right on it.