Thursday, August 21, 2008

Just an FYI

Jerry Falwell, an American religious leader, sued a magazine after it published a biting satire of Falwell that mocked his piety. Indeed, a state of Virginia jury awarded Falwell $200,000 after concluding that the magazine had inflicted "emotional distress" on the well-known clergyman. But the U.S. Supreme Court later threw out the award by explaining that satire, no matter how scathing and upsetting to its target, was protected by the First Amendment.

Friday, August 15, 2008

Olympic fever! Catch it!

So tired this morning. It's my own damn fault, I mean, I stayed up most of the night watching the Mens' water polo team in China. Damn those boys are fine. If I weren't in the middle of completely transforming the world of marketing I would totally get tickets. I love the olympics. The dedication, the passion, and the best part is that nobody needs to pay them. I wish we had more people like that around here, blindly dedicated and completely uncompensated. Imagine the things I could do then.

So you may have heard we won a little gold medal of our own recently. You can read about it
here. I love new clients. They're so wide eyed and expectant, like virgins on their wedding night. And then we defile them. But early on they're so happy they can barely contain themselves. I mean they are getting to work with us, right?

Case in point, here's a quote from our newest pigeon at Freeman, Tony Purdy. "When imc2 shared its strategic thinking and creative concepts with us, they not only hit the ball over the fence, they hit it out of the ballpark"

Now, I'm not much of a sports guy so the football analogy is lost on me but, aren't those two things the same? I don't know. Alan says we should just be happy we finally reeled one in. I thought we had no shot on this given how unprepared we were, but Alan said not to worry. "If you can't dazzle them with dexterity," he told me "you need to baffle them with bullshit." And my goodness does that man practice what he preaches.

He's coming down soon to celebrate and to get some face time with the creatives. To be honest, he kind of reminds me of that guy from Star Wars, you know Jabba the Hut, except that instead of Leia and that frog hookah Jabba uses Alan has one paw on my admins ass and another grappled around some 128 ounce diet coke monstrosity from 7-11. Who drinks that much diet coke? Seriously, every time I see him all I can think about is Jabba wearing a backwards Kangol hat and a t shirt with the sleeves cut off. It's really distracting.

But I digress. Marc just came in and let me know I have a few things to attend to immediately. Sometimes I wish I didn't have to think for everyone, but I guess thats the burden of genius. For most of you, have a happy Friday and remember it's pay day. For the rest of you, well, there are extra boxes in the copy room. You should totally let me know if you need a reference.

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Catching up on some email

Ah Thursday's. How I love them so. Most people look forward to Friday and the end of the week. Not me. Friday tends to be pretty hectic for me around here. In the mornings I need to go over to the accounting group and decide which freelancers we're going to hold off paying and after that I have to walk around the office and glad hand the schleps in the studio. I swear all this pretending to care is exhausting. 

But not on Thursdays. No sir. Thursdays are set aside for some me time. I roll in around 8:30 and hit the zen room. I usually need a good hour to get my head on straight. After that it's over to my office and I spend the morning catching up on emails. Not my emails mind you, no no. I do that all week. Thursdays are my day to read employee emails. Man is that fun.

Of course if there's anything critical happening, Glenna brings that to me right away. Can't let those little fuckers get too restless, you know? I remember this one time how those idiots in the NY office were griping to each other about how their office sucks and they get left out of things and wah wah wah. Whiners. Don't they realize I'm giving them an oasis from that God forsaken hell hole of a city they live in?

Glenna burst into my office in a panic. "I think we have a problem, we really should think about how we can improve morale up there" she said. It's hard to tell when she's kidding or serious because her face is that strange orange color, but the furrow of her eyebrows gave her away. As soon as she knew I was on to her we both burst out laughing.

"I almost had you there" she said, practically crying with laughter. "Improve morale...." We laughed about that one for weeks.

But back to the task at hand. Scan the emails, read the IM's. Look over the report on who's posted their resume where... Man, lots of unhappy employees. It may be time for another town hall. I love those. Rand came up with the idea actually. Hold a meeting and call it an 'open forum' and ask for questions. Give some half assed explanations about problems within the company and ask for feedback, then sit back and find out who all the dissidents are. It really helps weed out the bad apples. Glenna and I then put their names on a list and in a few weeks we find a reason to get rid of them. Usually we call it a layoff, but sometimes not.

Rand is fucking brilliant about stuff like this. He comes up with these Jedi mind tricks all the time. He's got this thing called the drama triangle. It's basically a bunch of buzzwords that make the group believe that anyone who complains is emotionally broken and shouldn't be trusted. The more you bitch, the less functional you become. We've gotten it to the point where anyone who complains usually gets vilified by members of their own team. It's so obviously Orwellian I'm surprised no one has figured it out. That's the brilliance of Rand. Fuck them right in their own assholes. I swear, if he were working for the Germans in the 1940's the Jews would have been killing
themselves.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

We're Hiring!

Ok, I admit it. I'm a glass half full kind of guy. All this talk about layoffs and firings blah blah blah has gotten me down lately, but when God closes a door....

So I was sitting in an interview with some candidate for Vice President of Recreational Services and Glenna was doing her thing of peering into my office to see how things were going when it hit me. Firings mean hirings. And if anyone is in a position to hire, I mean really fucking hire, it's us.

I got so excited I cut the interview short, which was ok, cause we were going to hire her anyway. We always hire the first person who comes in. Rand says that the first person in line is always the most qualified, and I never question Rand.

I waved Glenna in and asked her to gather up all the recruiters so I can give them one of my signature pep talks, IMC is going on a hiring binge!

Glenna quickly reminded me we fired all the recruiters. Whatever. They sucked anyway. We don't need recruiters, we're imc2. People are fucking dying to work here.

Anyway, if you know anyone, let us know. We pretty much have openings in every office in every city. Nothing too urgent though. Except now that I think about it we could use a new CFO. I had to fire the last one. For cause of course, no layoff for Mr. Lavey.

I mean, how hard can it be to be a CFO here? I kept telling him, if you can't cook the books for a company like ours, you must be a fucking moron. Do you even know math? Those guys at Enron hid tons of things from the government for years, and they were pushing billions around. You hear that Mike? Billions. With a fucking "B."

I know we're a top digital agency and all, but it's not like there's THAT much money to screw with. Can't have everyone thinking we're insolvent. So I fired him. Good riddance. Honestly. Sometimes it feels like amateur hour around here.

Sorry to digress but if you know anyone looking to work at the greatest company on earth, let me know.

Monday, August 11, 2008

The ghosts of Christmas past

Ian and I were sitting in the Zen room yesterday trying to clear our heads of all the negative energy flowing around this place lately, and try as I might, I just couldn't stop thinking about all those people we fired. I mean they sucked and we had to get rid of them, but still, why are they all so, you know, angry?

It's really bothering me, like day and night bothering me so I thought a good sit in the zen room would help. No dice. Even my double soy chai tea doesn't even soothe my nerves like it should. I just keep seeing all those faces and thinking "Why the hell did we hire you all in the first place, you ungrateful pricks?"

Don't they know that his is the best place they'll ever work? Don't they see how we're changing the way marketing is done? We're visionaries here people. If you want to make an omelet and all that.

Ian tried to calm me down by explaining to me they're just all feeling jilted, like when you're dating a really hot girl and you're just an average looking guy and she leaves you and starts sleeping with half the football team and you have to go to the prom and see her here in that slutty red dress and...

Honestly I just tuned him out after that. Note to self. No more getting high with Ian before hitting the zen room. He loses focus too easily. Come back to me buddy, we're talking about me here, ok?

Sunday, August 10, 2008

What's all the fuss about?

So a bunch of my former minions are creating quite a stir. See here. 

Honestly, I don't understand what the problem is. What part of "Advancing Relationships" don't these little shits understand? Didn't they learn anything under my tutelage? Didn't they grow like flowers in my garden while they were here? I certainly fertilized them enough.

They piss and moan about all the hours they put in and how they're over worked, well, that business didn't win itself. You know how many cocks I had to suck to get those meetings in the first place? My jaw hurts just thinking about it.

So some of them got you got fired. At least I hired the best damn HR staff to do all that axing. Do you know how hard it is to find someone who works in HR that looks like Leatherface? It took weeks, but totally adds to the intimidation factor. It may not have been pretty but by God they were canned by professionals.

And what's the big deal about the business we're losing anyway. Didn't hitler say it was better to have won and lost than to never have won at all? Look on the bright side, years from now they can all be proud to look back on this time and tell their friends about how they worked for an agency that was fired by some of the biggest companies in the world. Good luck being able to say that at whatever bullshit job you get next. Losers.