Sticking the landing

When I freelanced in San Francisco for nine months, I was living in Santa Monica. I'd fly up every Monday morning, and back every Friday night. Occasionally, I'd have to come back a time or two mid-week. What I'm saying is lots of take-offs and landings.

Landings, with all they imply, are a welcome part of any flight. It means the screaming baby in 11B will soon be a thing of the past, you'll be able to take your iPhone off airplane mode and, provided you don't clobber someone taking your carry-on out of the overhead, you'll never have to see, make small talk or apologize to any of these people again.

What I've noticed a lot, especially in the age of discount airlines, is that when landing, a lot of times pilots simply come in hot. They have schedules to make, flight attendants to diddle (make sure they're fastened low and tight across your waist) or another plane to pilot. They're in a hurry to touchdown.

We've all been on that flight where you feel your bones rattle when the plane slams onto the runway, and then a flight attendant blows the dust off some old joke over the P.A. like, "As you may have noticed, we've just dropped into Kennedy."

Rare is a pilot who manages to stick the landing. I was fortunate enough to have one on my flight this morning.

It's family weekend at young Mr. Spielberg's university. So the wife and I hopped JetBlue to the red state to see our boy. When we touched down, it was barely noticeable if you weren't looking out the window and watching the ground come up. The wheels hit the asphalt with a gentle, feather touch. Both of them in sync, making contact at the same time. No loud screech of the rubber hitting the road. No one gear down and then the other. There wasn't a person within earshot who could stop talking about how perfect it was.

So kudos and many thanks to the JetBlue pilot(s) this morning. You gave a cabin full of sleepy, weary travelers a gentle reminder how the talents of a skilled pilot can make getting where you're going much more pleasant.

To everyone who flies, I wish for you what I had today. Happy landings.

Are you available the 25th?

Here's what you need to know about Santa Geoff. His dreams have come true. It says so right there in the small print.

"Since he was a boy, Santa Geoff has dreamed of delivering presents to all the good boys and girls around the world."

I'm a big believer in dreams coming true. Good for Santa Geoff. Because it's something he's always wanted to do, I'm sure he makes an extra effort to do the job as well as he can. No threadbare spots on the red velvet. No matting in the beard. No twinkle only in one eye. This is a man who's literally living the dream.

"Santa Geoff is accredited by the Professional Santa School..."

It's the difference between a handyman and a licensed contractor. An amateur and a professional. A Santa who's been to the professional Santa school (apparently there is one) and all the others. I imagine it's a rigorous curriculum of HoHo'ing 101, Chimney Diving, Reindeer Veterinary Care and Advanced Gift Wrapping. They also offer Beginning Sleigh Repair & Maintenance, but I think that's an elective. Anyway, somewhere at the North Pole there's a degree with his name on it, and that's good enough for me.

"...and has undergone a full background check so you can feel confident that Santa Geoff is the best Santa for the job."

Background checks are a good thing - especially when it comes to fat strangers in red suits who may at some point have your child on his lap. Besides things like drug abuse and a prison record, I wonder what else comes up in a Santa background check. Hosting back room reindeer fighting with Michael Vick? Loitering at Christmas tree lots? Listing Bad Santa as his favorite movie? By the way, the last one would be enough for me to hire him.

"Always cheerful and jolly, Santa Geoff loves being Santa and is dedicated to being the best Santa Claus possible and making every event memorable for both children and adults! Just ask Santa Geoff how to make your experience even more unique."

Clearly, Santa Geoff is going to do his gosh darn best to make your holiday event merry. The part that concerns me is asking him how to make it even more unique. Frankly, it conjures up some fairly un-Christmas-y naughty and not-so-nice images. It also brings a whole new meaning to "decking the halls."

Anyway, if you need a Santa - and really, who among us doesn't - it seems like you could do a lot worse than Santa Geoff. Plus as you can see by the area code, he works in Orange County.

Although I think we all know that's not the home office.

Don't ask: Working the weekend

I know what you're thinking: why haven't I posted a new installment of my ever popular Don't Ask series - the one that brought you such widely read and revered gems like Don't Ask: Moving, Don't Ask: Picking Up At The Airport, Don't Ask: Loaning You Money, Don't Ask: Sharing A Hotel Room, Don't Ask: Writing A Letter For You and the perennial Don't Ask: Sharing My Food.

Well, tonight's your lucky night. I'm posting my latest in the series, and it's about a particular nuisance that effects every creative person in the business: working the weekend.

Jay Chiat of Chiat/Day fame had a quote that's been misquoted and bounced around ad agencies ever since he said it. If you're in advertising, you're already saying it to yourself: "If you're not here on Saturday, don't bother coming in on Sunday."

Looks like I won't be seeing you Sunday.

Agencies are notorious for their outsized and aggressive disregard for both working smart and your life. If they did the first one, working weekends wouldn't happen nearly as often as it does. Which would mean you'd get some of your life back.

Since I believe agencies will start working smart and utilizing their time more efficiently about the same time I ride my unicorn to Xanadu while drinking from the Holy Grail, I've chosen not to wait. I'm taking it back. Weekends are personal time. They're days of rest by definition. They are non-work days. Here's what I do on weekends. I spend time with my kids. I go out with the wife. I get things done around the house. I veg and binge Breaking Bad again.

Know what I don't do? Work.

Maybe if there were fewer 12-person meetings to kick-off the latest banner ad, not as many mandatory attendance pep talks to rally the troops, and less presentations to the staff from the Executive Group Specialist In Experimental Branding Strategy & Innovative Demographic Search Engine Optimization Solutions, there'd be enough time during the week to get the actual, bill-paying, income producing work done.

Not to brag, but because I have this policy of no weekends, I get my work done during the week. When I pack up Friday night, everything that needed to be done is done. Monday will bring a whole new set of challenges, and I'll get those done during the next five days too.

I know this is a radical position for a freelancer with a kid in college to take. Especially since weekends are usually double time. At a nice day rate, that can add up pretty quick. I know freelancers that hope for weekend work - something about gettin' while the gettin's good. Whatever. When your relationship with your kids turns into a Harry Chapin song, don't come crying to me.

Don't get me wrong. This is not to say I haven't worked weekends and won't again on those very few occasions it's necessary. But it usually isn't, despite the desperation, authoritative tone, insinuations about reputations and false logic that since they have to be there you have to be there. Almost as weak an argument as "If I do it for you, I have to do it for everyone else."

So go ahead, talk about how I'm too good to come in on Saturday. How I don't want to be a team player. How pissed everyone's going to be that they're at work and I'm not.

And if you want to tell me to my face, fine.

Call me. I'll be at home.

Let there be light

It's dark at night.

I bet that's the kind of piercing insight and keen observation you read this blog for. You can stop rolling your eyes now. I'm not talking about outside - I'm talking about inside my house.

Our living room has always been light-challenged. There are ceiling lamps off to the side in what used to be a dining room, and another off to the other side in what used to be a bedroom. But no one really likes the harshness of those lights, or the amount of coverage they offer. And yes, a lot of rooms used to be other rooms in this house. It's like Disneyland - it'll never be finished.

Anyway, we used to have lamps on the end tables on either side of the couch, which made reading comfortable and easy on the eyes.

But then, in an act of sheer hostility and defiance, the lamp on my night table in the bedroom crapped out. It started doing strange flickering things when I turned it on. It was actually a little disturbing, since there was no rhyme or reason to when it would start acting up. I was scared it was either a poltergeist or conspiring to electrocute me. Or both. So I trashed it, and moved one of the ones in the living room next to me in the bedroom.

Ever since, my living room is like the moon: half in light, half in darkness. I was going to say covered in a fine gray dust with footprints from 1969, but why open that can of worms.

The problem replacing the lamp has been trying to find one that somewhat matches the remaining one. I don't know if you know this, but there are literally thousands of lamps to scroll through online - and it's exactly as much fun as it sounds.

I'm getting to the point where I'm ready to run out to Lowe's and just buy one. The wife doesn't want me to do it, but I told her we could look forever and the perfect one might never show up.

She said, "You're telling me."

Candid camera

A lost episode of COPS? An avant-garde student film? Nope. What your looking at is my driveway, as seen from one of our closed circuit security cameras.

You might be wondering why we've taken the extreme step of installing a security system at our house, especially since the TP'ing ended years ago.

Here's the story.

A few years ago, we started noticing some strange characters coming and going from a house across the street and four down from us. Which was strange because, as far as we could tell, the people who lived there looked like fine, upstanding citizens, perhaps public servants or business professionals.

I'm just funnin' ya. They were strung out meth tweakers. People who visited the house looked like the cast of Oz, without the warmth.

One day, my wife and daughter were driving home and saw one of the tweakers walking down our driveway. They drove slowly and watched him walk back to his house, then they called the police.

Initially the police didn't want to come out to warn the guy about trespassing, but once they did they realized they were dealing with some very bad people. They came back to our house, and let my wife know they had a very long rap sheet that included drug dealing and firearms charges. They also told us to call them anytime if we noticed anything odd going on over there.

The thing is, there was always something odd going on. And as a result, the cops were at the house about twice a week, at all times of the day and night, for over a year. Sometimes it was one police car, and other times it was four or five screaming up to the house, guns drawn. It was very entertaining, and we could almost set our clocks by it.

The house was owned by a sleazy lawyer. We figured out the deal was he got them out of jail when they got busted, and he got a cut of their drug money.

By the way, I forgot to mention that neither our house or our neighbor's house (our former great neighbor and friend Sebastian - come back Sebastian!) was broken into when he was coming out our driveway. We figured the tweaker was probably window shopping both houses, but then heard Max - the world's greatest German Shepherd - start barking up a storm and high-tailed it out of there.

Right after the driveway incident, we got the closed circuit camera system for the house. We have several cameras covering the whole property, and can tune in and watch the show no matter where we are. We have a lot of footage of the FedEx guy delivering packages from Amazon, but so far no more meth heads.

Eventually, the police department called to tell us the sleazy lawyer couldn't afford the house anymore and had decided to sell it. Which, thankfully, turned out to be true.

Now, a nice family with two young kids live there. They've been renovating the house since they moved in over a year ago, and it's looking good. I'm not sure if the renovations included an exorcism, but I think it's worth considering.

As for the closed circuit camera system, together with Max and our alarm system it brings us a great deal of peace of mind.

I just have to remember not to take out the trash in my underwear.

Suit yourself

There are several ways to tell it’s not me in the picture. Let’s see if we can name them all.

First, the suit isn’t black. Complete giveaway. Next, the model is thin. Shut up. Then, my hair, although once that color, isn’t anymore (my dad went gray at 25 - I never had a chance). Finally, it's been a while since I stood in a spaceship, Frank Gehry building, stage or wherever the hell he is with a 50 Shades Of You Know What Happens Next look on my face. But in my rich fantasy life, that’s exactly how I look in a nicely tailored suit.

Which brings me to my next point: I need a suit. A real suit. A grown up suit.

I don’t have much occasion to wear one, although I have been going to more funerals than I’d like the past few years. Part of the problem is I work in advertising, an industry which lets me dress like a fifteen-year boy old most of the time. On the rare occasion I have a reason to dress up at work, it just means tucking my shirt in my jeans, and wearing the black New Balance sneakers instead of the yellow ones.

However, besides the funerals, there've also been some weddings as of late. Or as I like to call them, a waste of a perfectly good Saturday. Plus, I’m also a member of the Magic Castle, which, in its quaint, throwback ways still maintains a dress code. And while I’ve managed to get away with wearing an old suit I have, it’s so long out of style I may as well be dressed for my bar mitzvah.

By the way, the jacket I wore to my bar mitzvah was blue. At the age of thirteen, I hadn’t developed my affinity for a black wardrobe yet. I also hadn’t developed any affinity for Hebrew school, but did that stop my parents from sending me there? No it did not.

Anyway, the point is I can’t keep wearing the same out-of-style suit to functions and venues that require one. I need a new suit.

The ones I’ve always liked are made by Hugo Boss. I remember years ago, there used to be an advertising awards show in Southern California called the Beldings, and early on they used to be black-tie. I’d go out, rent a tuxedo and show up looking quite snazzy while I was losing in every category.

Nothing feels quite as good as losing in rented clothes.

This one time, as I was trying on my tux at Gary’s Tuxedo in Santa Monica, I noticed one of the mannequins wearing a Hugo Boss tuxedo. You know you’re in trouble when the mannequin looks better in a tux than you do. Why not – he had the nicer tux.

I asked how much it was, and at the time it was around $1700. So I did some cypherin’ and figured out if I rented a tux at a hundred bucks a shot seventeen times, I could own that Hugo Boss (alright, so the math wasn’t that hard).

Well, you know how this story ends. At the time I didn’t have the foresight to see how I’d ever have seventeen occasions to dress up, so I didn’t pull the trigger on the purchase. Of course I’ve needed one many more times than that in the intervening years.

Which brings me back to my point: I need a suit. My strategy is to lose a little weight first (which has been my strategy since 1985), then go out and buy myself a stylish little Hugo Boss number.

Can you guess what color I'll get?

Direct deposit

Not long ago, I was freelancing at this agency that had a national car account, and wasn't too far from the beach. Which describes almost all of the agencies I freelance at.

But at this particular one, they had a little service they offered freelancers that others didn't. One that made my life easier. Ask anyone that knows me - I'm all about easy.

As far as I was concerned, this service was pure magic both in its concept as well as execution.

I speak of the freelancer's little helper, Direct Deposit.

Being a little compulsive, and always liking to keep a close eye on my money, for years I'd get a paycheck then make a mad dash to get to the bank before closing time and deposit it. But not anymore.

Now, I sign up whenever and wherever I can. Magically, my money appears in my account a day before payday. I can see it online. I can write checks against it. I can talk to it late at night, tell it my hopes, my dreams, my fears.

I might be getting off topic here.

The point is I used to be afraid of giant corporations being able to get their big corrupt hands on my bank account, and now I'm not. That's true for a lot of things in my life. Flying. Sushi. Adam Sandler movies.

Alright, I'm still afraid of Adam Sandler movies.

If you have the opportunity to get Direct Deposit where you work, I strongly suggest you do. It's nice when your company makes money appear in your account.

Of course, it'd be better if they could do it as fast as I make it disappear.