It appears a few months have passed since I've written. I'll dispense of the usual excuses offered to create the image of an overly-busy life that I do not, in truth, lead. Suffice to say I shot a bunch of commercials for Mercedes which I'm sure you've all tivo'd past while watching "Lost". Upon completion of these thirty-second achievements, I quit my job. Now, I am sitting at a new job, which is like the old job, in that i'm doing the same thing, only now i'm writing cliche scripts for Verizon instead of Mercedes. Scripts which, if they get made, you will Tivo over. Talk about a rewarding career. As an act of preparedness, though, I started on a freelance contract to make sure I liked the place before going full-time. Freelancing sounds a lot more appealing in name than in practice. (Come to think of it .. freelancing? Never actually studied that word before. I sure as fuck am not working for free, so I don't know why that is that part of the word. And I'm not lancing, whatever lancing is. Could it be "lancing" is a term from the medieval days? Or is that jousting? Weren't those long metal spears known as lances? Did people walk around with them and fight each other for free, hence leading to today's term for overpaid, useless professionals like myself? Am I a corporate mercenary? Okay, my curiousity led me to an entry on freelancing in wikipedia, where I have found, as usual, that my astute instincts were right on the money. Freelancing was originally created to refer to knights (aka lances) for hire. Which must have sucked, being a knight and getting hired for a couple of sixpence to go fight a fire-breathing hell-dragon.)
It isn't that far from truth even today. As a freelancer, u get no respect. I had to fight to get email and voicemail, and people treat you like that guy at a bbq nobody really knows but is sitting by the keg drinking all the beer (ever notice these guys usually have moutaches?). Worst of all, since freelancers aren't on the full-time payroll, we have to fill out all these hour reports and submit them, then they can pay you whenever they feel like it. Oh, and you don't have insurance. So I am just kinda sitting here coming up with shitty ideas for Verizon for free. Which is probably more than they're worth in the first place.
To complicate matters, some ad agency down in Durham, NC flew me down for an interview yesterday (my headhunter is preparing me for the fact that to work at the kind of agency i want -- namely, the kind that doesn't spend all their time making shitty commercials -- I'll have to leave NY. Reason being NY is home to the big, corporate agencies that work for the big, corporate corporations that make big, corporate commercials. Like IBM, as example.) So they flew me down. Or rather, American Airlines flew me down. The agency simply paid to have American Airlines do that for me. As the fifth side-note of this blog, when is the last time you flew in one of these regional airliners like American Eagle? Durham isn't far enough away from New York to merit the use of a real plane, apparantly, so they use these "regional" jets called Embraers that are the size of corporate jets, only they fill them with about 30 people. It is comparable to flying in an apartment elevator laid on its side, filled with eighteen people. Which should be fine, as the flight to and from Durham is only supposed to be an hour. But thanks to thunderstorms and two hours of circling over the airport, that one hour became three. Suffice to say, these flying elevators take travelling to a whole new level of misery.
So, Durham definately isn't New York. Which primarily means you can find two-bedroom apartments for less than $6,000, it smells like something other than rat vomit, you hear more birds than sirens, and you can leave your window open for more than forty minutes without Sri Lankan pubic hairs floating onto your pillow. But you also need a car, something I've grown extremely fond of not owning. And I don't know anyone in Durham. And it's .. Durham. Which I'd be okay, with, if the people who read this blog moved there with me. So get back to me on that point. Collectively, we can make a decision. If they offer me a job, which, based on the final person I interviewed with, isn't likely (at a certain point an "interview" crosses over into an "interrogation", and he was dangerously close to that point.) But we should all do it anyway. It'd be like Bay Area all over again, except we'd have research triangle park instead of silicon valley, and blimpie's instead of togo's. Other than that, it's the same place. And I hear they aren't as spiteful towards "orientals" as they were fifteen years ago. So that's a plus.
Let me know. I should be blogging more these days as it seems I am working for free. So warm up your reading glasses. The workmonkey will be comin at cha.