My Ad Portfolio - Chapter 3
Harbour views. Free beers. The fucking works.
A series about my illustrious career in advertising. Here’s Chapter 1 if you want to start there.
By early 2008 it became clear that being a nocturnal receptionist at a Masonic Club hotel was not a nice long term life. The hours were exhausting, the conditions depressing and - it turned out that my secret smoking area by the bins was directly above the hotel’s lint trap, so - I was in the bad books with my manager, Marie.
My Surry Hills share house had a creative office across the road. On warm afternoons as I was on the front step, rolling Champion Ruby up in a Tally Ho for breakfast, I’d watch the people coming and going. They didn’t look like artists necessarily, but they carried themselves with confidence and presence. They seemed like the kind of people who, at minimum, could get their names on the door for an MGMT (DJ only) set at Oxford Act Factory.
I had no idea what they did there, but it made me realise what my three non-negotiables were for any future workplace:
work hours not from 11:30pm-7:30am
short commute
Cheap Mondays jeans allowed
A few weeks after this relevation, on the eve of Anzac Day, a recruiter from a temp agency called me with a job: $23 an hour to proofread financial plans for typos and spelling errors at AMP’s Paraplanning Office in St Leonard’s. $23 x 40 hours? That was like $900 per week?! Pretty much a grand a week. Which - if you played your cards right - was infinite money.
The dress code was “office” so the Cheap Mondays could only hug my legs on casual Fridays. And the commute involved a train over the bridge and back every day. But the hours were correct, and when we’re talking in the realm of nine hundo gross per week - sorry, but it sort of changes things.
I got drunk, slept in, turned up three hours late to my Anzac Day shift at the hotel and tendered my resignation. The next Monday I put on my newly acquired office clothes, caught the train to St Leonard’s and began my proofreading career.
The job was easy at first. Many of the paraplanners who drafted the documents didn’t speak English as their first language, so adding value was relatively easy (and, in moments, kind of rewarding). The money was great too. Not as good as I’d originally thought (had forgot about tax, HECs, unpaid lunch breaks, etc.), but each Thursday I wound up with $575 in my bank account. This was enough to pay rent, eat lunch at Oporto, dinner from the $10 menu at The Shakey and then drink so much each weekend that I was anxious until Wednesday afternoon - so pretty good!
My colleague Roland and I became mates and we spent our days drinking coffee and gossiping about all the Sydney DJs we mutually knew (it was 2008, there were hundreds of the cunts). We befriended some of of the paraplanners, had fun making enemies of others. We even went bowling once.
It wasn’t all roses, though. The work became boring over time, the workplace and it’s surroundings a little bleak. I began feeling less like a fascinated memoirist gathering material and more like a bored person living without intention. I wore the same cheap black leather shoes every day and developed a foot fungus so disgusting that it needed medical attention.
Examining my blue-green foot, the doctor (who was also my godmother, Linda) asked me “how did you let this happen?” It was a good question, and probably one I should have been asking myself more often.
A series of decisions needed to be made. Thankfully, the first one was made for me. The plot of The Big Short unfolded in the US and, suddenly, the financial planning industry didn’t need me.
On my last day I had a sad little glass of Prosecco and collected my farewell card. I walked out onto Herbert Street, triumphantly snapped my security fob in half and threw it into a hedge. It felt good, but as I walked towards the train station, the gravity of it hit me.
Savings would last me a month or two, but ultimately, I’d need to work again. And this time - if it was going to last longer than six months - I’d need to at least try and stick to my non-negotiables. I walked towards the Pacific Highway and allowed myself to a daydream of a fictional workplace where I could thrive.
Somewhere that let’s me dress in the plain grey American Apparel t-shirts that express who I am.
Somewhere the internet doesn’t have a block on MySpace.
Somewhere that doesn’t just tolerate sloppy man-children, but have an entire department dedicated to housing them.
Harbour views. Free beers. The fucking works.
