The ad game

The worst job I ever had — even worse than being the manager at an ice cream parlor that was drowning in debt because a manager two managers ago had stolen a lot of money — was as a copywriter in an ad agency in Washington, D.C.

This place had the worst reputation in town, known for being a sweatshop where employees were routinely abused in every way. I was young and didn't know any better when I took the job.

The first year I was there the comptroller, who was a friend of mine, told me our turnover was 400%. 400%! With 65 employees we went out 260 W-2s at the end of the year. People would quit at the end of their first week. People would quit at the end of their first day. One guy, a bookkeeper of some sort, left for lunch on his first day and never came back. I figured that was the record, until one guy quit before he started working.

During the summer, when work was a little slower, the agency would stop working after lunch on Friday, then lay out a spread and beer for the employees. The creative director would show all of the work we'd done that week, people would party a little, then leave.

Apparently a new account executive was hired on a Friday morning and invited to come back that afternoon to meet his new co-workers. Someone must have told him what he was in for, and when Monday rolled around he didn't.

The comptroller and I retired the Shortest Tenure Trophy after that.

One time an account executive there was interviewing for a job at another agency in town. The woman interviewing him looked at his resume and noted he'd been at our agency for three years. "Yes," he replied, proud that he'd been there that long. "Why?" she asked him.

It was the kind of place where the employees were expected to arrive by 8:30 a.m., and had to note in a logbook why they were late if they were. The president's two children, who both worked there, could roll in at 10 and no one would say a word. The president would tell people an ad campaign had to be done that day, so she could review it first thing the next morning, and people would stay late to do it. She'd come in the following day at noon, eat lunch for two hours, make an employee walk her dog, then convene the creative department at 4 p.m., review the work, tell everyone it was awful and make us stay late to redo it.

We had six coke addicts on staff (that I knew of), a couple of married folks having an affair, and backstabbing and office politics of the worst sort.

I'm leaving out a lot of what happened during my three years there, but whenever anyone asked me why I stayed I always had the same reply: "It's the best show in town and they pay me to watch it."

But the day I was fired I bought a bottle of champagne.