My Advertising Portfolio, Chapter 2
It was 2007 and the government was finally coming for our inside cigarettes
Over the years, colleagues and recruiters have suggested that I should have a portfolio of the ads I have made so I can get offered jobs. I’ve tried a million times, but I can’t do it. Uploading all your ads to a little Squarespace site? Yuck! Listing your industry awards and shortlists? Humiliating.
They should be able to just look at me and know that I’m not fit for the job.
But, you know what they say? The only way out is through. I need some sort of portfolio to document my journey. So here’s an attempt at that.
I was 22 and I lived in a share house in Glebe with my friends’ Steve and Kym. But, this particular night, was back at my parents’ place having Sunday dinner with my family.
Also at the table were a well-meaning couple — friends of Mum and Dad — that I didn’t know very well.
The subject of me being a ‘writer’ must have been raised, because the man in the couple suggested a career working in an ad agency as a copywriter.
I nodded politely and said something like thanks, but I’ll probably just continue to be an actual writer, instead.
I looked back to my lasagne, but he doubled down.
“You can do both.” He said. “Write ads during the day, earn a great wage. Write your books in your down time. That’s what they all do.” He said.
“Yeah, I don’t really want to do that though.”
The man’s wife chipped in now: “Well, you’ve got to do something…”
“Why?”
Now, this was in 2007 - a decade or more before the internet made the term ‘boomer’ pejorative. But looking back, this was a classic generational misunderstanding. As a silverback millennial, I grew up with the influence of Gen X slackers and ne’er do wells: Your Rob Gordons from High Fidelity. Your Wayne Campbells from Wayne’s World. Your Mick Foleys from WWF’s Attitude Era.
Traditional markers of success were not on my radar, man! For me at the time, the coolest thing you could have was a menial job you hated plus a small amount of status in a tiny scene that no one outside of it cared about.
The hated job I had covered: I was the graveyard front desk receptionist at the Castlereagh Boutique Hotel - an ancient three star hotel in the city, owned and operated by the Masonic Club. I clocked on at 11:30pm, two or three evenings a week and wrote my blogs and smoked my ciggies and then wandered out into the beautiful Sydney daylight at 7:30am.
The small amount of status was debatable, but my housemate Kym did the door at WampWamp at Brighton Up Bar on Wednesdays and sometimes Purple Sneakers at The Abercrombie on Fridays - so my wrist was pretty well stamped. We would drink our longnecks of Carlton and Reschs in the backyard and then go to these rooms above old pubs and sway around but never dance while people we sort-of-knew used CDJs to queue up Heartbeats by The Knife. The same cool-ish people were at all of these things and you would come to meet them all and gradually work your way onto some of their Myspace Top Friends pages - which is nothing if not an incremental gain in status.
I suppose what I’m saying is that life was fun and felt like exactly what it was meant to be at the time. So - however well meaning - the implication that what I was doing was less than “something” annoyed me.
But, I can see how on paper — given my happy childhood and excellent education — I wasn’t living up to my potential. I knew that, of course. I obviously should get a job that uses my brain at some point. But the thought of it was is scary and hard and I just feel like being being reminded of that today, by this random person.
“Why do I need to do something?” I said. “I pay my rent and bills doing what I do now?”
It felt confrontational in the moment, but probably just read as surly and adolescent.
The rest of the conversation must have been unremarkable because I don’t remember it. My brain had already left the table. I was thinking of all the blog posts and zines I would write. All of this stupid life I would live so I could document it and show this person, show every one that it was something and it did matter.
Later that night I went home, changed into my crumpled black suit and walked from Glebe, down Bridge Road along past the Kauri Foreshore, over the Pyrmont Bridge and into the city.
I arrive and say hi to Sunny, who does the 3:30-11:30pm shift. Sunny leaves quickly, forgetting to close the porn video he’s been watching behind the desk on the reception computer.
I check in a businessman from Melbourne - a regular - and nod politely at the sex worker accompanying him. After he gets in the lift I google his name and note that he was the President of a private golf club in Melbourne and found some photos of him and his wife.
A bit later, one of the guests - a witness in a Supreme Court case, we would get them staying a lot - calls me to complain that her bedsheets are covered in ants. I go up to the room with new sheets and swap them for the old ones, which aren’t covered in ants. An hour later, she calls again to say that the ones I gave her are also covered in ants.
I print out the arrival cards, empty the air conditioner’s water trap and update the announcement board in reception (there’s a War Widows Lunch tomorrow at 1pm). Once all that’s done, I sit down at the little chair behind the desk, log into Blogspot.com and start typing.