Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [22]
The client, however, didn’t agree. She was furious. “It’s not about the chardonnay or the crocodiles; it’s about the fare. It’s about $158.00 round-trip to Boston.”
And she was really bitchy about it, too. We had served excellent cookies and espresso in the meeting, and I wanted to reach across the table and take her cookie away. “Give that Mint Milano back, you bitch. If you can’t at least be polite, you don’t get a treat.”
Here is a woman who is solely responsible for the brand image of Amtrak, our nation’s flagship railroad, and she’s wearing a tacky pantsuit from QVC and twelve-dollar shoes. She sat back in her chair like a trucker and complained, “Why the hell don’t you talk about the new engines we got? We got all new engines on most of our trains. Why can’t you say, ‘Come aboard and experience our new engines.’ Why can’t you talk about that if you don’t wanna talk about the price?”
I smiled and very calmly said, “Because people don’t ride in the engine. They don’t care. All they care about is what they see out the window and will they get where they’re going on time.”
She glared at me and said, “I don’t want you working on my business.”
Likewise, bitch.
And from now on I fly everywhere.
I wasn’t always this bitter and gangrenous. I got my first job as an advertising copywriter when I was nineteen, four months after I moved to San Francisco. I had long, curly hair and wore sunglasses at all times, which in the mid-eighties felt totally rad. I was so thrilled to not be pumping gas at a Getty station that I arrived in the office at four-thirty in the morning and left at midnight.
One of my first projects was to write a print ad for a potato.
The National Potato Board needed to replace its current ad, which featured a potato covered in thick, green latex paint and the headline “What must we do to make you realize we’re a vegetable?” This was when they were trying to reverse the perception that potatoes were just junk food.
The new strategy was all about speed. Microwave ovens were relatively new, so speed was exciting news. And potatoes were known to be slow. So I did an ad that featured a potato in a wind tunnel, like a car. The headline was “Aerodynamically designed for speed.”
The potato people were very happy. They bought the ad, and then they needed me to write the actual body copy.
For this, I would need a recipe. So I contacted the woman at the ad agency who was in charge of getting me a very fast recipe for a potato, and she kept telling me, “I’ll get it to you tomorrow.”
She was a very busy woman who lived on a houseboat in Sausalito, and understandably, my potato recipe was just not a top priority. So in place of a real recipe, I wrote my own temporary place-holder recipe. It read: “Just slice a potato, broil for ten minutes, then sprinkle liberally with parmesan or blue.” Which is exactly how the ad ran in magazines.
It was one of those things that just slipped through the cracks. And nobody even noticed until Adweek magazine did a small article about my clever potato ad. They liked the visual. They liked the headline. They questioned the recipe. “We’ll have to try this curious recipe in our Adweek test kitchens,” they snidely remarked.
I was thrilled to see my ad in Redbook. And I was especially proud of my fast and simple recipe. I liked to imagine extremely busy moms in Tennessee reading my recipe and thinking, Wow, I never realized you could make a potato so quick, and then serving it to guests. I liked to imagine the guests crunching into the rawish potato, gluey with melted cheese. The potato slices would surely have been scalding hot in some places, cool in others. They would have been starchy and caused cramps. “Gosh Phyllis, these potatoes are so . . . fresh.”
This was great advertising.
Maybe what I need to do is diversify. Perhaps I’ve spent too many years in traditional consumer advertising and now need to write commercials for prescription yeast-infection medications or make infomercials.
As cheesy and downscale as infomercials