Please Feed The Animals

The following is a guest post from my friend and sadly-former colleague Mark St. Amant: Award-winning Creative Director, best-selling author, and unemployed ad fellow like the rest of us.

“I know this… a man got to do what he got to do.” – John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Back when the Depression hit — not this latest gluttonous Wall Street Cristal-spraying sub-prime gambling orgy shitshow Depression that’s gotten us all laid off; I’m talking about the Depression, the Great one, the Hooverville chicken-in-every-pot only-thing-we-have-to-fear-is-fear-itself bread line 30+% unemployment one –when that Depression went down, people traveled far and wide to find work.

It’s what was expected. No questions. You live in Oklahoma’s dust bowl? There’s a pig farm in Nebraska that’s hiring migrant labor, a month of guaranteed pay, meals, a non-leaky roof over your head? Well, Mr. Sooner, load up your mule with a few pairs of overalls, a jug of whiskey and some hardtack (whatever hardtack is/was), and get your ass up to Cornhusker country. Yesterday.

That’s just what people did to survive when the economy went bust and jobs, like ours recently have, disappeared by the millions: they physically went looking for work everywhere within a reasonable, and often unreasonable, distance. Didn’t matter where, long as it paid money that men (stand down, PC police: there just weren’t many unemployed female laborers wandering the countryside in the early 1930’s) could send home to take care of their families, keep clothing on their backs, put bread on their table, and keep Steinbeck’s uncontrollable ‘monster’ – the bank — from taking away their homes.
Sound familiar?

Sure, okay, we have the Internet now. iPhones and Blackberrys. Plaxo and LinkedIn. We don’t need to ride stinkin’ mules to find work. And who needs hardtack – I just looked it up: it’s an inexpensive biscuit of flour, water and salt — when you have Fiji water and cranberry-apricot Clif Bars to sustain us as we sit on our ergonomic ball-seats sending emails and IM’s to agencies, updating our Facebook statuses and blogging about how tough things are right now? Don’t get me wrong – things are tough. Like, no doubt, many of you, I have a mortgage I worry about paying once my severance runs dry. I wonder where — and what – and for how much — my next job might be. I battle an unfortunate blend of downright giddiness and underlying angst about my second child, a boy, arriving in June. (Granted, I’ll have plenty of quality time with the new little guy should I still be out of work in three months, so, well, that’s a nice silver lining.)

But things could be much worse. Not to sound like some of our parents in the 1970’s who shamed us into cleaning our plates because “there are starving children in China who would love those green beans you’re hiding in your napkin,” but I think we 2009 creative (mostly) can all learn a lesson from our unemployed, Great Depression forefathers.

• Get on that mule: It’s always better, whenever possible, to meet/chat in person than via email or, worse, Twitter. Yes, the ball starts rolling with a call or an email, but if the agency at which you’re hoping to land an interview – informational or otherwise – is within, say, a 300 mile radius, then drive there. Amtrak there. Peter Pan, Bolt or, hell, even (shiver) Lucky Star or Fung Wah there.

Case in point, I just went down to New York to meet with an agency that, considering my sports writing-slash-ad guy background, has been my longtime dream job — and I made it my first Fung Wah experience. While I fully expected goats gnawing on Schlitz cans in the aisles, a family of twelve huddled in the port-o-john cooking a squirrel over a crude Bunsen burner, and/or a homeless guy performing horrific acts of grunting self-abuse in the seat behind me, it was a very pleasant journey. Easy down, easy back. They even make a ten-minute McDonald’s stop on I-95. And the best part? Round trip, $30. And the face-to-face meeting? It went great. Might get work out of it. Might not. But they couldn’t have been more impressive both as creatives (expected) and as truly decent, funny, interesting, down-to-earth people (they seemed that way via email prior, but let’s be honest – character, especially that of the uber-successful, -awarded or -talented, is sometimes a crapshoot in our biz). Mind you, it was only Boston to New York, so I don’t pretend that I was Tom Joad schlepping to work a California orchard and battling strikebreakers. But making the effort to physically get down there showed, I hope, how badly I want to work with/for them.

So if you have even an inkling of small crack of daylight of a sliver of an opening of a chance for a meeting, don’t just say “Well, IM me if anything comes up.” No, bash through that opening, make any excuse whatsoever to be in their neighborhood/city, and offer to meet them in person anywhere — at the agency, at an Orange Julius — anytime. Sounds simplistic, and you don’t want to be too aggressive or desperate and end up with a temporary restraining order, either. But when I was an employed Creative Director and someone contacted me about a job, I always felt an affinity toward the people who added that they’d love to meet in person sometime – the ubiquitous “call to action” with which most of us are familiar — versus passively saying “Uh, gimme a shout, um, you know, only if you want to.” Not to sound like Tony Robbins here — who, incidentally, looks like the bastard child of Ben Affleck and an Easter Island statue, doesn’t he? – but shift some of the power back into your own hands.

• Remember how this feels: You’ve sent out countless emails and made calls to friends-of-friends, casual acquaintances, loose LinkedIn connections, CDs you’ve always admired in Archive or the One Show annual, et cetera, and . . . nothing. Silence. Crickets. Sucks, right? Well, remember this feeling. Bottle it. Label it “The Wretched Stench of Zero Professional Courtesy” and put it next to your laptop.

Remember when you had a job/office/phone extension/corporate email, and you’d get calls/emails/cyber-newsletters from vendors/reps/job-hunters, and you’d sometimes roll your eyes and sigh about how bothersome they were because you still had those goddamn radio casting specs to write? Well, on the other end of those missives was just someone trying to do his/her job, someone looking for work. I’m no Mother Theresa – I’d tell the Fung Wah driver to run you over if I saw you heading to interview for a job that would feed my family — but back in the dark ages (two weeks ago) when I was a gainfully employed Creative Director, unless I was trapped under a toppled armoire or temporarily unavailable on a shoot/edit, I always tried to personally respond to every email or call as soon as possible. Because people too quickly to forget what it feels like to be on the other end, and how much a simple response — even a “Thanks for writing/calling, we don’t have anything right now but I’ll definitely look at your book/look at your directors’ reels and we’ll keep you in mind” — really means to someone who’s as worried, angst-ridden, scared, but still strong, driven and eager to work as we now are.

This isn’t to say that everyone whom I’ve contacted recently has blown me off. Not the case. Some very familiar advertising names – CDs and agency heads who are far more successful or talented than I’ll ever be, and who actually are busier than most humans — have been nothing but helpful, thoughtful and encouraging. One head of a local agency took the time to offer wonderful advice not only about his agency and other Boston-area shops and job-hunting in general, but offered invaluable advice about being inventive as a creative. One LA-based CD was even kind enough to email me back as he was literally landing in Hawaii to judge the One Show, because he knew he’d be busy and forget later. The CD of the NY agency I mentioned earlier, and the other folks there, couldn’t have been cooler and . . .well, more human. They’d certainly earned the right not to be human — a right too many creatives and agency people inexplicably invoke – but they were anyway.

And if I haven’t gotten a response form someone yet? They might truly be busy or hate my work or have a family crisis or be out of the country — who knows. That’s fine. It’s their call. No harm no foul. And my nature is to give people the benefit of the doubt. But while there are clearly truly decent people out there, in my nearly 18 years in this business I’ve always been amazed and, in a weird way, sadly amused – this is just advertising, people; we’re not exactly searching for a cancer cure here — at the self-importance and overall lack of professional courtesy and basic respect people give one another. So when you find work again — and you will — don’t be that person. Remember how not getting a response feels.

Here are a few other random laid-off-person tips, now that I think of them:

• Keep clean. Shuffling around your house in a ratty robe enveloped in a disgusting cloud of gnats and self-pity isn’t good for anyone there, Unabomber. Bathe/shave/dress in the morning — every morning — and you’ll feel like a halfway productive member of society, and feel less inclined to build a suit of C-4 and plot revenge against your old agency.

• Keep busy. Write. Jog. Paint. Take up Muay Thai. Read. Join a fantasy baseball league (and, shameless plug, read my weekly column on Rotoworld.com! http://www.rotoworld.com/content/features/column.aspx?sport=MLB&columnid=230&articleid=32398). Take a University of Phoenix lion-taming course. Podcast. Do anything to keep your brain sharp and give yourself a brief respite from the job-hunt crunch. Otherwise, you’ll go batty, get fat and lazy or, worse, be lured into less constructive activities (see next). And for the love of God, if you’re going to watch TV, turn it off by 9 a.m. sharp. Nothing says “shame spiral” like Live from New York . . . it’s Regis and Kelly!

• Keep away from porn. You might be home alone all day now with copious amounts of free time, but don’t, under any circumstances, be sucked in to the bottomless vortex of On-Demand HD pornography. Watching porn alone (especially after “Regis & Kelly” while still un-showered) is utter rock bottom, and will only lead to the fire department eventually kicking in your door after your neighbors complain of a weird smell and finding you mostly nude on a beanbag chair covered in cookie dough with a Ziploc taped over your head. Not, I’m guessing, what you want in your obituary.

• Keep the faith. If you’re kind to people, work hard, remain true to your own personal standards (creative or otherwise), then Karma, I’ve always believed, will pay you back. You’ll land an even better job than your last one. You’ll get more money back on your Federal tax return than you ever imagined. The boss who canned you will be crushed by an escaped rhino. Things will get better.

Apologies for the long post; I clearly had some time on my hands. Thanks for reading. And a bigger thanks to my former co-worker Erik for starting this great community/resource for all of us ad folk. Best of luck on the job hunt.
Speaking of, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go book a ticket on the Lucky Star . . . hopefully in the non-homeless-guy-wanking section.