Leading From the Front

The office is in chaos today so I haven’t much time to write. This is supposed to be my lunch break but I’m balancing my laptop on my knees while eating some exotic wrapped snack from Starbucks. Who could have known that blogging could be so expensive?

We’re in a panic because My Boss, idiot that he is, forgot to mention that he’d agreed to produce an advertising campaign for one of our key customers. It was just a few preliminary ideas that we were meant to have come up with before he travels to Leeds this afternoon for a meeting with the company’s top staff.

Not that we’d done any of the work. At ten o’clock this morning, My Boss finally deciphered the note he’d written himself weeks ago and then came rushing out of his office to inform us that we had two hours to do the work that normally takes two weeks. He helped facilitate this miracle by screaming as all the creative types, demanding that they ‘be more creative’. There’s nothing so certain to make creative types uncreative than being shouted at. Roger, one of the copywriters who wears floral shirts to the office and likes Europop, ran from the room in tears when My Boss questioned his use of a question mark. A question mark? In the world of advertising, where the trend is to write everything in lowercase letters, question marks are as unwelcome as flatulent wrestler at a festival of sumo.

Forgive me. I’m writing this quickly and my similes aren’t helped by my nerves and the coffee.

This afternoon, I’m hoping for a quieter time. My Boss will be in Leeds and the rest of us will try to talk Roger out of the gents where he’s been locked all morning. It not as easy as it sounds. Once he turns on his iPod and starts listening to his collection of Erasure EPs, there’s no getting through to him.