Liquid Lunch

from A Tale of Jobs Not Well Done

The door to the industrial office fridge was made of glass. I think it was designed to display impossibly fresh produce or farm gathered organic eggs and perhaps a cute little six pack of Coke in the vintage bottles with the pure Mexican cane sugar- like the kind you see in design magazines.

Ours was mostly filled with half eaten lunches in crumpled brown bags or Styrofoam boxes now stacked or crammed into the shelves. Every Friday afternoon, the leftover take out would find its way to the garbage.

I only cared about the bottom two shelves.

They were stocked with beer. Always full and with a variety of brands including a couple of high alcohol IPAs I really liked. Not that it would have mattered.

I did my best to make a dent in the inventory each afternoon, and try as I might, the empties I created would miraculously be restocked the next morning.

I felt at home in this new job.

The rest of the office had an equally misguided sense of posterity. Everything seemed a decade too late. There weren’t enough employees to fill the massive square footage, so the poured cement floors and open floor plan picked up every noise.

I didn’t yet know that the company would fold in 9 months.

Right now, I was a Senior Account Director for a downtown advertising agency that had a fridge full of beer and wine.

I had an office with a door, only one of about six that surrounded the open floor concept where the real work was done.

As fate sometimes enjoys a dumpster fire as much as the rest of us, my adjoining office was home to the two Creative Directors for the agency. They came as a pair.

I learned later they had been plucked from a run-down 1970’s boat they moored on Eastlake to re-brand and revitalize the sinking agency. They had gone halfzies on a 67’ behemoth more suitable to Captain Quint from Jaws than Zuck’s yacht and used it as their freelance office.

Andy and Carl could finish each other’s sentences and had just completed a summer, writing copy for a questionably motivated think tank for an unquestionably large day rate.

They floated into this new job much in the same way I did, with past experience trumping recent flat lined output. We were the same people on the same trajectory.

Too many years earlier they had written Super Bowl ads, and the jingles they created are still used in pop culture references today. They had worked on skits for a fledgling YouTube channel that would go on to become a household brand that gets billions of hits. And propelled some of the former creatives to win Academy Awards. But now, Andy and Carl had come ashore to save a dying ad agency.

We immediately bonded over our similar age, and much like the office, we were a decade past our prime. We then found out our careers had crossed earlier at another agency although at different times.

What sealed the deal was that first day’s lunch.

We, of the offices with doors, didn’t bring in lunch, nor did we run out and grab take out to hustle back and eat at our library desks.

No, we were grand thinkers of important ideas and needed space, time to ruminate and strategize on big plans.

And we needed alcohol.

So we went out to lunch. And for nine months a quiet little restaurant near the waters edge of Elliott Bay saw an odd influx of revenue, along with three forty something assholes who drank more of the bill than they ate.

There was no revenue coming into the agency, we could see that. At least not enough. Andy and Carl busied themselves with the re-brand that was somehow going to catapult the agency back to its glory days.

I managed a small team dedicated to a local tech company, doing tedious work I had no capacity or desire to do. It showed.

When things got bad, down the elevator we’d go out the front door and cross the driveway to the garage and order mussels in cider and house cured salmon and perhaps the kale gratin. All costly add-ons just to get a few beers and a bottle of wine in us.

Talk of office politics and where the money was coming from gave way to delusions of grandeur as the alcohol fixed our headaches from the night before. We plotted a new agency, a boutique, lean creative juggernaut we would form to bring us back to the spotlight.

We hardly took notes as surely we’d pick this up the next day, as surely as the beers and wine were needed to rid us of the hangover we were going to have.

Again and again, we waxed on, ignoring our current plight in favor of dreams of better days.

Going back to the office then was a study in time and patience. Riding out the buzz in our offices, doors closed, waiting for an appropriate time to wander into the kitchen.

A couple hours later we’d get to work on depleting the beer and wine selection.

(Part 2 next week)