Sometimes things get crazy in the ad world, and I mean CRAZY. There are some touchdowns you have to land with 110%, especially if the project is on fire and there is active damage control. And sometimes that calls for sandwiches.

I had been with the ad agency in question for two weeks, halfway through a month-long assignment doing a lot of the day-to-day stuff. Banner ads, relays with copywriters and QA, little peeks at bigger pieces. And I was trying too hard to be friendly; I had just come out of a multi month engagement at a Korpi Dev facility with a very cozy team environment of about a dozen, I was looking for a new nest.

The Set-Up

Korpi Ads was in another gear, at another speed in a different lane. Here was a three person team, looking for a fourth, two seniors and a junior with an open seat. I bottom runged on grunt work that nobody else wanted (and murdering it) but nobody there was smiling at me. Well, Adam, the other junior, but we were all swapping video graffiti links and talking MF Doom.

There was Andrew, the senior who was an Art Director / Front End Developer hybrid, and Harvey, who was a UX Ninja / Code-Killing-Machine. Andrew was more easy going, but all of his conversations had to be 30 seconds. He had a lot of things to juggle but was always cool and friendly if you had a brief, relevant question. Harvey was just mad. Mad at the clients, mad at the work, mad at the code, and mad at you for being other. He just needed to be left to build his crazy shit, he remains one of the best ActionScript developers I’ve met.

Overseeing all of this was Shaun, who was the traffic coordinator for the four of us and about a dozen other resources (copywriters, QA roles, idkwtf). He was a very, very serious cat. He had brought me in off of good word from a previous assignment and had no problems throwing me into the deep end to see how I would fare. A true representation of the maxim “you can do the job or you can’t”.

If you tell Shaun that you will have the piece ready for client review at 11:00a, he would be at your desk with his “Well?” expression on at 10:58:30a sharp. If you needed more time for the morning, this is something you should have known by 2p yesterday, and he had another expression he would wheel out, the “This Will Not Do.”

Appearances Bleak

In the second week, Shaun grabbed me for a walking lunch so we could talk about things. He had wheeled out the TWND expression twice in my assignment, which was both twice more than tolerated and the magic number that required a walking lunch. He opened up the whole beast and explained the way that things worked in his shop, both on paper and in the practical world. I needed to buckle down if I wanted to keep my place on the team. It didn’t matter that the guys would have big loud conversations about music, I was not to join in. Keep your mouth shut and get the work done.

It felt grim. I was convinced that I was done for at this iteration of Korpi Ads, and was already fantasizing about what my next desperate-to-get-that-next-project/gig portfolio was going to look like. As it turns out, it was a very large and odd beast that I was involved with, and, as is usually the case with such beasts, I did not have full visibility on what was happening.

At the beginning of the third week, Shaun comes up to my desk, notably nervous. There was a *big* order that had come in that they had an urgent need for, and an expected surplus of time on Harvey’s desk was eaten up in a fire on another project. Andrew and Adam were both tied up on other pieces, so Shaun was faced with tracking down another resource on no notice, or going with… me.

The Opportunity

The ask itself was nothing earth shattering, there was a book-like template that had been built out in Flash, “flip-books” was the term used, and a certain amount of the content insertion could be handled with ease. The question marks came in with the requests that would involve changing the template itself, working and integrating new elements into a highly evolved piece of ActionScript.

“You’re good with Flash, right?”
“Yep.”
“ActionScript coding, not just that timeline shit?”
“Yep.”
“Have you ever built anything like that flip-book template?”
“No, that is pretty sophisticated.”
“Do you think you can learn it?”
“Yeah, with a little time.”
“Cool,” drops a CD-ROM on my desk, “here are all of the source files, learn it tonight. We need you making changes to CLNT-0Z0 tomorrow. You good with that?”
“…sure?”

The look of terror in Shaun’s eyes at the uncertainty of me taking the gig… But there we were, together up poop creek. He only had me to do this, and this was the only thing the shop had for me to do. If I knock it out, I can prove my value, if not, that’s their decision made as to looking for a new junior, they’ll short-day me for the rest of my contract.

I did what we do in these situations, I jumped after an opportunity and did all that I could to prepare myself. I had the template source file, as well as a couple of projects built in it that I had quietly pocketed. I ripped them all apart to recognize the common elements, I even built a weird little Doctor Who flip book to prove to myself that I could stand something up in it. Daleks!

The Big Day.

When I get in, there’s a stack of all of the changes needed, along with a post-it from Shaun saying to check in with him when I was at my desk. We walked through everything, marking up page notes, scribbling furiously, the sweet smell of Sharpie. I needed to get all of it done that day. Was it possible?

“…sure?”

And I attacked my tasks. The easy ones flew by, and as the team returned from the lunch I had worked through, a little more than half of the list had been Sharpie’d into oblivion. Things were looking positive, which, of course, is when the gremlins emerge to offer their contribution.

Glitches, bugs and cranks. At 3p, I go over to Shaun’s desk to tell him that I won’t be able to deliver by 5p today, but I am confident that I can get it all done if I can have a little time to work into the evening. He gave me a halfway TWND and shooed me away, “get back to it then.”

A few minutes later he comes over to my desk to tell me that he and I can camp in the shop for the evening, The Powers That Be Need This Thing Complete. The Client is Most Distressed. Whatever You Need, Make it Happen.

Running Over

The day came to its normal end, and folks are filing out. Adam and Andrew both gave me “good luck”‘s, Harvey was kind enough to offer an “It was cool to meet you” before he left. The group consensus seemed to be that there were a couple of pieces in it that were just going to be too rough, too crap, and that Andrew or Harvey would have to bat cleanup in the AM.

7p rolls around, and we’re at a natural break point. I’ve got most of the pieces ready for review, Shaun is going to proxy the client and we’re going to run through everything, but first… “aren’t you hungry?”

The question took me off guard, “yeah, do we run out and grab something?”
“No need, Korpi likes to keep us close,” and Shaun walked me into the kitchens. I had seen them in my first little tour, and I would scuttle in there to grab a piece of fruit or a cup of coffee, but this excursion had us pulling out chairs and ingredients.

Most prestige agencies will do something along the lines of perks in the pantry, and while this was not Chiat/Day, they did have an amazing selection of lunchmeats, cheeses and produce. Decent bread and a respectable array of spreads. Nothing ridic but you weren’t stuck with bullshit neon mustard. We proceeded to build monster sandwiches and discuss the various shops we’d worked out of. Shaun was much more relaxed with all the routine ruckus of the shop pulled out of the equation, we got into discussion about careers as freelancers (he himself was in a residency/contract position).

We settle into our nosh, he busted my chops about previously seeing me doctoring my bus tickets. He’d caught me affixing the correct time bit at the top to the correct date bit at the bottom. “With what we pay you? Dammit that is some petty hustling. Just get a month pass and write that shit off.”

We went back into the last of the changes. A couple of animation pieces needed tweaking, okay, good speed on the bar graphs growing. Tuning the transition wipes. Shaun throws me a pound and tells me to keep at it, grab him when I’m done. As it turns out, while I’m working on this and he’s “supervising” me, he’s got a project of his own going at his desk. I won’t flat out say he was double-dipping, but…

The squeek of a sharpie across a page, and I look at disbelief at all of these notes that are now crossed out. Did I get through it all? A final review with Shaun and it appeared to be the case, I had gotten the flip book complete, and we were closing the lights and heading out by 9:30p. “Don’t worry about tomorrow, we’ll let you know about the rest of the week.”

I thought I was out of there right then and there, as if the evening shift had somehow firmed up the decision in their minds, “get rid of this guy, he runs over budget.” An email from Shaun the next day only said that I had done a great job, again, they would let me know when they needed me.

The Beast Turns

Turns out, they had me back in two days later. Turns out I still didn’t know exactly what was happening on this big beast. Turns out that Andrew and Harvey had both been impressed with what I had done on the Night of Flipbooks and Sandwiches, they both expressed interest in keeping me on as a part of the team. The days of inactivity were just the team figuring out what the next moves to make were, and which resources would be the best to use.

After that, the mood was very different. I got a little respect and recognition, the house had seen what I was capable of in a clinch, and most importantly, I felt that I had earned proper kitchen rights. There wasn’t another work day there that I did not make myself a Sandwich of Distinction and Triumph. I was included in the music conversations, and Andrew started sending me links to all of the weird things he was excited to check out at SXSW. While Harvey was never actually friendly to me, he did complain about things to me, which I came to learn was his way of expressing affection.

But it was that first sandwich putting me at ease, and Shaun told me at a later point that he rang the dinner bell when he knew that it was going to be okay. I had taken care of enough that he knew it was going to happen that night, nobody’s balls were going to be on the block with the client the following morning, and his observing my strategy and tenacity that day had filled in the blanks in his mind about keeping me on. So even while, in my mind, I was losing the opp because I had run over time, the Decision Maker in the equation was noting more my ability to adapt and pick up new skills.

I worked with that Korpi Ad House for another two years after that, both in-house as a regular and as an emergency resource for spotwelding or overflow work. And without fail, every single time I went in, I would find myself in the kitchens. The last time I was there, in 200?, the very last thing I did before leaving the building? Hit the kitchen and make myself an indulgent beast of a sandwich. And believe me that the next time I am in there, I’m getting in at sandwich o-clock. Because once you earn the keys to the kitchen, nobody can take them away.