Plate spinning

Today, I’m spinning plates. Or juggling. As I have been for the last few months—not very well. Every day seems to bring more deadlines than work hours. And I edge precipitously towards panic. The clown who got fired from the circus.

This is a good problem. Entrepreneurs don’t get paid if they don’t work. Work is money. Money is useful. But it’s a challenge, nonetheless.

And I’m thinking of my friend, Glenn.

Glenn is a marketing guy I met when we both worked at the same ad agency. He had never worked in an ad agency before. He made the switch from ad agency client/VP/marketing mahoff to ad agency guy and was, to put it bluntly, miserable. It was real, palpable, soul-crushing culture shock.

Glenn’s a great guy, funny, smart, a born salesman and fantastic brand ambassador for the organizations he’s marketed. But he was simply psychologically unprepared for the insanity of the ad agency world.

You know, up a six a.m. Coffee. Start working. More coffee. Work til 10 p.m. Eat, if you dare. Cocktail (mandatory.) Then “sleep,” which, in Ad Agency World, means “toss and turn all night, as all the demons of tomorrow either keep you awake or invade your nightmares.”

It’s a scary world that Glenn had never known existed before he made the supreme mistake of taking that ad agency job. A world he had very little interest in inhabiting. And a lot of interest in escaping. (He did, to his eternal credit.)

Glenn and I share the same irreverent sense of humor. We hit it off immediately and he would often camp in my office to kibitz, seek solace or just vent.

One day, he uttered a line that lives in perpetuity.

“You know what working here is?” he asked, immediately answering his own question. “It’s a never-ending term paper.”

Oh. My. God. Did he hit the nail, or what? Anybody that’s spent more than a minute working for an ad agency knows exactly what he meant.

Thanks, Glenn. You are still making me laugh, all these years later. And laughter is what gets me through.

Gotta go. Plates are teetering. Another term paper, due. And I just spent time I don’t have writing this blog post. What was I thinking?!

=S

TO BE CONTINUED

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