HELP! A Bear Is Eating Me! - Mykle Hansen [5]
If you existed and were here listening, you might ask just what sort of team-building exercise we had in mind, me and my department of trend-reversal morons, to travel so very far from our natural element, specifically our air-conditioned offices in the sleek twenty-second floor of Seattle’s famous Merch building. What life-bending experience did we think this place could offer, to weld us together into a mighty unstoppable five-headed Godzilla of trend-reversal? Shit, I don’t know, I don’t believe in any of that teamwork bullshit. A team, really, is a group of people who do what I tell them to do, or else I fire them.
But basically we came to kill bears. Frink and Baumer apparently come up here every year to shoot ducks and fish and whatever else is small and defenseless and moves slowly and is halfway edible. And all those guys have been whining to me for some kind of off-site for months now, ever since I made the management error of letting one of our recalled hair product clients personally congratulate them for the supposedly excellent job they did following my orders and implementing my plan. Like that’s not their job. The hair clients even gave us all little gift boxes full of — no kidding! — the self-same recalled hair product that we had just so deftly convinced the hair-washing public was safe and sexy and wouldn’t cause excessive scabbing or patchy baldness. Right … like I’m going to put that on my head. But the boys in Image Team did, and it did something to their brains — it made them think they deserved things.
So here’s my whole doe-eyed, scabby-scalped department whining for an off-site, and then Frink and Baumer pitch this fishing, sniping, blowing duck calls and wearing orange underwear outside our pants in the beautiful Alaskan wilderness package. I immediately called them on their total lack of balls. I told them: boys, you are a pathetic pack of pussies if you need high-powered ammo to kill a duck. Ted Nugent uses a bow and arrow, for Christ’s sake, and he kills moose and bears. Eats them, too. Raw! Drinks their blood! Subsists on nothing but moose burgers and bear sandwiches for months at a time, and then comes back home to NugeLand and writes deep, plaintive songs about the human condition. You little girls couldn’t kill a moose if I sedated it, strapped it into an electric chair for you, showed you an instructional video and held your soft, trembling hands.
And of course they knew I was right. Being right is my job. The thing is, some managers hire people they’re excited to work with. I prefer to hire people I’m excited to dominate. I don’t want to work with my subordinates, I want them to work for me, instead of me. I’m the idea man, and in marketing that’s the only man who counts. Delegation means never getting caught up in lame, tedious, time-wasting “work.” I create, and I delegate. That’s all I do.
And while the delegating side of my brain berated my weak staff, the creative side of my brain got to thinking how very client-impressing a large bearskin rug and a stylishly taxidermied bear’s head might look in the client-impressing outer lounge, or perhaps even more so in the deal-clinching inner lounge, behind the wet bar. I hear that a creative over at Vermion has a bear’s paw humidor on his desk. Probably bought it at Crate & Barrel, or bearparts.com. But the point is, I heard about it. It made an impression, on a whole chain of jaded industry people linking that Vermion creative to me, and if Vermion’s making an impression, then we’d damn well better be making a bigger one.
To make a long story short, I sweet-talked the Ups and the Veeps into bankrolling a little bear-bagging expedition for Image Team, under the excuse of “departmental bonding.” They love teamwork, those Ups and Veeps. Teamwork is their mantra. In fact the senior partners fly to Thailand together each January for three weeks, to do coke and fuck hookers, as a team, and to strategize the future of the firm. That’s how they bond. It’s said that when a group of really rich men fuck the same hooker, it