Gum surgery

So this is going to be a quick post tonight. Not for the usual reasons (laziness, lack of discipline, dead battery), but because my mouth is sore and I'm tired.

Obviously from the photo this is a post about gum surgery. I can hear your question from here: "What do achingly cute German Shepherd puppies have to do with gum surgery?" Exactly. My first move when looking for a picture for this post was to go to the Google and search gum surgery.

Take it from me—like the surgery itself, that's something you don't want to do.

A couple visits back, my dentist noticed a small lesion on my lower gum behind my front teeth. Small though it was, they thought it would be a good idea to get it biopsied to make sure it was nothing to worry about. They also think it's a good idea to floss everyday. I'm not going to tell them how well I follow that advice.

Then on my last visit, it had gotten slightly larger. So this morning, at 8 a.m., the periodontist cut it out and sent it on its way. And really, is there a better way to start the day?

The good news is he's done this procedure a million times and seen a lot of these. Once he got it out and had a good gander, he assured me it's definitely nothing to worry about - and the pathology report will just be confirmation of that.

Meanwhile, I'm a little sore, but nothing that Tylenol can't handle. Ironically, for the next couple days I'm also on the same diet my daughter was when she had her tonsils out last month. Being the good patient I am, I'm following those instructions to the letter.

For dinner tonight I had two vanilla milkshakes from In-N-Out. Doctor's orders.

Hospital sushi

When my daughter was out here last month on her Christmas break from school in Iowa (don't get me started), she didn't do a lot of the usual things you'd expect students on break to do.

She didn't go to movies every night.

She didn't party with her friends at every chance.

She didn't go with her BFF's to Disneyland and stay until closing time, or until (SPOILER ALERT) Mickey and the other cast members take their heads off, hang up the costumes and head out to their second job. I'm sorry you had to hear it this way.

She didn't do any of that. Instead, she had her tonsils out.

Now, of course she could've had them taken out by someone in Iowa. But before you accuse me of being an overly protective, elitist west coast dad who thinks Iowa doctors—as educated, experienced, compassionate and stellar though they may be—just aren't good enough for his daughter, allow me to do it for you. You're absolutely right. (Full disclosure: it was an Iowa ENT who looked down her throat and said, "Oh yeah, it's your tonsils. They have to come out.")

So six days after she got home, her mom and I were in the Outpatient Surgery Center waiting room at Long Beach Memorial, biding our time until she came out of recovery. I'd like to mention her surgery was performed by our ENT, who also happens to have been Chairman of the Division of Head and Neck Surgery at Long Beach Memorial from 2008-2013, and is currently Chairman of the Department of Surgery at Long Beach Memorial and oversees all surgical divisions at the medical center.

I'm just sayin'.

Anyway, somewhere just shy of the halfway mark of the 8 hours we spent there, the wife and I were feeling a bit famished. But we weren't about to leave the premises in case the doctor wanted to talk to us, or they needed me to scrub in on an emergency surgery (I didn't go to medical school, but I did see 8 seasons of Grey's Anatomy).

So I made a run downstairs to the basement where the hospital cafeteria is, along with the morgue. Coincidence? I think not.

It was pretty much like every institutional cafeteria you've ever seen. But what caught my eye was the pre-packaged sushi. As you might know by now, sushi's one of my favorite credit card torching, bank account-draining meals. However the idea of hospital sushi was only slightly more appealing than gas station or car wash sushi. The good news was if it made me sick, I wouldn't have far to go for help.

I decided to go for it, but to also hedge my intestinal bet by buying a chicken salad sandwich along with it. As I think back on it now,I should have probably given more thought to the age of all that mayonnaise in the chicken salad.

When I got back to to the surgery center waiting room and started eating, I was spotted on a security camera, and the lunch police nurse was in front of me in a nanosecond letting me know there was no eating there as a courtesy to patients who weren't allowed to eat at least 12 hours before their surgeries. Like that was my fault.

But since my daughter was under the knife, er, laser, I didn't want to rock the boat. I decided to obey their rule. And by obey, I mean break it.

Since it was late in the day when I got back with the food, the only people in the waiting room were families of patients who'd already gone in. There was no one left for my eating to offend. I was still scared of Nurse Ratched, who was now sitting at her desk. So being the brave rule breaker I am, I put the sushi container in my wife's purse and snuck bites out of it when she wasn't looking.

Driving home after her surgery, my daughter wanted to stop at In-N-Out for a milkshake, one of the few things she was allowed to have for the next couple of weeks.

If I'd known we were going to do that, I definitely would've thrown the sushi back.

Don't ask: Borrowing my phone charger

What's better than one sequel to a popular series of blogposts? Several sequels. Which makes today your lucky day as yet one more post gets added to my outrageously successful Don't Ask series.

I assume you're already familiar with the classics (and if you're not, don't burst my bubble - just let me think you are): Don't Ask: Watching Your Stuff, Don't Ask: Working the Weekend, Don't Ask: Loaning You Money, Don't Ask: Writing a Letter For You, Don't Ask: Sharing a Hotel Room, Don't Ask: Picking Up at the Airport, and the perennial Don't Ask: Moving - one of the most popular and requested of all.

While several other series remain dormant on this blog, like Guilty Pleasures, Things I Was Wrong About, The Luckiest Actor Alive and Why I Love Costco, this particular series continues to flourish thanks to the fact there's just no end to the things I refuse to do.

Tonight's entry is Don't Ask: Borrowing my phone charger. Here's the thing: phone chargers used to be expensive, especially if you were buying them at the Apple store. So most people just have the one that comes with the phone, and stays at home. They either charge the phone overnight and hope it lasts, or depend on the kindness of others to loan them their chargers at work.

My charger-loaning kindness is at 0%.

Instead of absconding with my charger—and making me hunt you down to get it back—there's no reason you can't have a backup charger all your own to keep with you at all times. They sell them everywhere. From the checkout counter at CVS (next to the nail clippers) to the checkout line at Nordstrom Rack (next to the hair ties).

They come in all colors, lengths and not only do they improve how long your battery lasts, they also improve how long our friendship will last. Win-win.

Don't get me wrong: next time the battery icon in the upper right of your home screen is in the red, by all means do the sensible thing and ask if you can borrow someone's charger.

Just don't ask me.

Throwing in the towel

There are a few things you should know about me if you don’t already. First is this: I don’t like what I don’t like, and I like what I like. (Chandler impression): Could it BE any simpler? I’m not complicated. At least not that way.

Next, and I think my current wife and every girlfriend I’ve ever had will back me up on this, I’m a catch. Especially when it comes to household chores like laundry and doing the dishes. You know, the ones everyone tries to avoid. While others are looking for an excuse not to, I charge head-first towards the dryer or the sink, ready to get the job done.

I’m the first responder of household chores.

Finally, in case you haven’t noticed, my personality might be best described as slightly compulsive. Exhibit A: Breaking Bad. Exhibits B, C and D: Springsteen, “my high school girlfriend” jokes, craps tables at the Venetian.

It’s no secret when I find something I like, I tend to go overboard with it. Which brings me to the Stonewall Kitchen dishtowels you see here. I love 'em.

Because one of the things on the long list of things I can’t stand is dishes in the sink—other things include paper straws, toilet paper from Trader Joe’s and whiny creative directors who haven't learned how to put the fun in dysfunctional—I wind up doing the dishes almost every night. And while a lot of that's just rinsing and putting them in our fabulous, whisper-quiet Bosch dishwasher, there’s also a considerable amount of hand-washing ones my wife calls "How many times do I have to say it—that cannot go in the dishwasher." To dry those, I can’t use just any dishtowel.

I need one that’s properly weighted. Thick enough to absorb, but not get water-logged. Not overdesigned with birds or flowers. One that retains its soft-to-the-touch feel before, during and after I'm done.

Stonewall Kitchen is that dishtowel.

I know what you're thinking: "Jeff's going on and on about a stupid dishtowel. He must be trying to get a bunch of them free from Stonewall Kitchen."

Frankly, I'm completely insulted you'd even entertain the idea that I'd stoop so low and be so obvious about doing something like that.

And I'll let you know when they get here.

Firing squad

I've said it before and I'll say it again. If you get fired in advertising, all it means is you showed up one day.

Jobs in the ad biz hinge on a number of factors, and often job performance is the least of them. How you get along with A) the creative director B) the client C) the clients' wife D) creative services or any number of other individuals can affect how long your shelf life is at an agency. Decisions that determine your fate at an agency are almost always entirely out of your hands, and can be made based on campaigns you've sold (or not sold), the shirt you're wearing (or not wearing) that day or the color of your eyes. The tag line for this blog says "We didn't invent random." Ad agencies did.

Like many people who make ads that make America buy, I've been laid off a few times in my career (pausing until giggling fit is over for using the word "career"). And I can tell you from experience, it takes a village. It's not as straightforward as it once was. No one says, "You're fired! Collect your things and get out!"

Well, they say the second part, but now they say it in accordance with state labor laws.

Here's an example. I'm not going to name the agency I was working for, Y&R, but I was let go after almost three years there. I'd originally been brought in as a freelancer, but the creative director and I hit it off and he decided he wanted me to stick around. So he offered me more work and less money, and I said, "Where do I sign?"

Fast forward a few years later. I'm in a meeting in Versailles, which was the agency's big conference room. For some reason, ad agencies love to name their conference rooms after cities. Or cars. Or explorers. Or movie characters. We take our creativity where we can find it. I worked at this one shop that just had numbers for their conference rooms. It was a nice change of pace.

Where was I? Oh yeah.

As I'm in this meeting, my creative director pokes his head in the door and says, "Hey Jeff, can I talk to you for a minute?" This is how it always begins.

I walk out of the room with him, and while we're walking he's making uncomfortable small talk about the meeting he pulled me out of. I notice we're going upstairs towards HR. When I ask what's up, he says to the office of the head of HR.

Alright, so I know what's coming, and I said, "Are you kidding me?" To which he said, "It's out of my hands. There was nothing I could do." To which I said, "Really? I thought you were the boss. How about you let me speak to the person in charge?"

I was pissed.

In the office, he sat uncomfortably to the side, not making eye contact - as they always do - while the head of HR told me I was being let go, gave me an end date, paperwork, blah blah blah. I learned shortly thereafter I was one of five people let go that day. I'm sure it was out of their boss' hands as well.

I came back the next day and spoke to both of them about getting more severance. My boss said nothing, and the head of HR said no. But this story does have a happy ending.

Some time later, that head of HR got let go - ironic ain't it? I was talking to a mutual friend, and come to find out the former head of HR had wanted her to ask me if I'd write some copy for a website she was setting up for her post-agency life.

I'm nothing if not a giver, so after a nanosecond of thought, I told my friend I'd like her to relay my two-word answer to the former HR head verbatim.

Since this is a family blog, I won't repeat them here. But they were exactly the two words you think they were.

You break it you own it. Again.

Earlier in the evening, when I was much more awake, I was in the mood to write a new blogpost tonight. But that was then and this is now. Nonetheless I didn't want you to go to sleep without a little reading material, so I'm revisiting this little number from a couple years ago. It holds up pretty well. See if you agree.

Now that we're in the hopefully soon-to-be-ending era of the shithole president, it seems every media outlet—or fake news organization as he likes to slander them—is lousy with Breaking News stories almost every minute of every day.

Not that some of them aren't legit, what with the liar-in-chief committing several impeachable crimes and saying (or tweeting) monumentally stupid, ignorant, racist, misogynist, homophobic, climate change denying, lies, uninformed and just plain wrong things minute-by-minute on a daily basis.

But in reality, a lot of the Breaking News is just an attention getting graphic to induce us to stay tuned for not necessarily new information on ongoing stories, reports and rumors that haven't been confirmed or profiles that aren't so much breaking as being updated.

All of which got me thinking (eventually something had to) about what would actually constitute Breaking News in advertising agencies.

Client only wants to see one idea.

Breaking with tradition, a major automotive client today asked the agency to only present one idea for the global branding campaign. "We don't know what you guys are doing all day, but we have work to do. No one has time to sit through three hours of storyboards and ripomatics on ideas your creative director 'Just couldn't let go.' Show us the one and get on with it."

ManifestNO

For a recent new business pitch, none of the agency copywriters were asked to work on a manifesto. Not by the creative director. Not by the account director. Not by the general manager, although he may have tried. Cell reception is bad from the golf course.

Instead of a lofty, cleverly worded, Jeff Bridges, Alec Baldwin or Peter Coyote sound-a-like voiced statement about what the product is, means and how it impacts the world and all who come in contact with it, the unexpected decision was made to just roll the dice and show up with good work.

No insights

In what witnesses called a startling admission and an unintentional moment of truth, the agency revealed it has absolutely no insights. None. Gerard Pennysworth, Vice President of Knit Caps, Ironic T-Shirts and Global Strategic Planning was quoted as saying, "Your guess is as good as mine. I don't know why the hell anyone does what they do."

Agency gives team enough time

Used to only having 15-minute coffee breaks to create global branding campaigns, yesterday a creative team was told they'd have three weeks to come up with a single television spot. When told they were in fact not the subjects of a cruel joke, the team went into shock and required immediate medical attention.

Buzzwords not allowed

Several account people were let go today for violating the recently instituted "no buzzwords or phrases" rule. When asked if perhaps the punishment was a bit too severe, Director of Human Services and People Management Kathleen Laytoff replied, "It's always difficult to let people go, but net-net at the end of the day, they just 'laddered up' once too often."

See you next fall

January 1st and I have what you might call a tumultuous relationship. Oh sure, I'm always happy when it comes around, but then something inevitably happens to break the mood.

For example last New Year's Day, I found myself in the ER with my blood pressure somewhere between steam coming out of a pressure cooker and a lovely hillside view. That was because at the time, I'd been prescribed a new med which, come to find out, funny thing, I was deathly allergic to. Doctors, amIrite?

Anyway, this new year the tradition continued. We got home from a lovely time at our annual January 1st brunch with the usual suspects. I was in the kitchen by the fabulous new farmer's sink we put in during our remodel a couple years ago, and turned around to walk back into the living room.

Unbeknownced to me, my teeny, tiny, virtually invisible 90-lb. German Shepherd had stealthily snuck up behind me and was standing there. When I turned to go, I went ass-over-teakettle (hence the picture) into a wall, the refrigerator and finally landed face down on the kitchen floor like a bag of rocks.

Physical comedy was never my strong suit.

My son happened to be sitting in a chair that faces our open kitchen and saw the entire event. He quickly came over to ask if I was ok, which I was. Besides my knee, arm, back and cheek, the only thing that was injured was my pride. And my until then perfect tour en l'air (look it up).

So bruised but undaunted, I continue into the new year with a brand new resolution—to try to be more careful and aware of my surroundings every January 1st.

And look both ways while crossing the kitchen.