Morning had once again arrived at the North & Main offices. Today, however, desks looked abnormally sad. The carpet looked more dingy than usual, and the air had that hollow, lemon-clean tinge of a discount hotel lobby. Someone had turned the Sonos speakers off. They were embedded in the ceiling, so it must have been a whole thing. You could hear individual clicks from keyboards and that soft ‘tick’ when you left-click a mouse. Each tick was the sound of someone trying to seem busy while refreshing Gmail. Over and over and over and over again.
Joel crossed through the space carrying his computer bag. He didn’t notice the silence; he had the Ford pitch on his mind. He was thinking through the strongly worded response he would send if they didn’t win the project. How he would shame them for not understanding their consumer, or at least not understanding him.
The office didn’t care about sad men or lost projects. No hard drives hummed from the edit bay. No sexist jokes from the media buying team. No Georgia singing the same hook with the wrong words over and over again. Joel plugged his laptop into his cubicle and watched his second screen light up. Email loaded, but it was mostly cold outreach messages from other desperate men trying to drum up work.
He typed ‘Georgia’ into the search bar, refreshing his memory from her slides they had discussed the night before. He expected a refreshed deck with new imagery that matched the retro-futurism direction he had given her.
“It’s simple,” he had said to her harshly, “futuristic elements, but with housewives who had perfect ringlets. That’s how Swiffer can recruit a new generation of consumers.” The visuals were meant to be ironic.
Instead of a beautifully polished deck from Georgia, her most recent message was a link to a cheap frame shop from last week, and a joke about making million-dollar ideas look like they belonged on a bus shelter. Joel lifted himself from his chair and leaned over the fabric-and-particleboard wall into her space.
Empty. That was really the best way to describe it. Like she was never there. Like her tiny little cube had been reset to rental. The thrift store sweater she found in the men’s section at Goodwill was gone. The tiny blue Post-its where she had drawn his late-night likeness. Gone. The dent of her body in the chair that had given her back problems. Gone. The cube and the furniture had forgotten her.
He tried out her name anyway. “Georgia?” The empty cube did not respond.
A sad parade drifted by. Pam from HR held a stack of manila folders to her chest and an unopened box of tissues that looked like a prop. There was a pale watercolor flower image printed on the box, part of Kleenex’s ‘soothing sick noses’ campaign. Behind her, an Account Manager carried her belongings in a cardboard box and held back tears. He wanted to tell her it would definitely get better, but he knew he was stealing that tagline from somewhere, and she might notice the hollow sentiment. Two creatives he didn’t know very well came past holding their coats. He watched them pass, but they didn’t look down at him.
The Slack channel named #wins was quiet.
--
Joel stood in front of the bathroom mirror’s cold honesty and watched his cheeks turn red. He couldn’t think of a moment-worthy line to say out loud to himself.
The stall door swung open, and Eli appeared. It startled Joel, who believed he was alone in the room. There also wasn’t any flush, which Joel wouldn’t realize until later. Eli looked abnormally disheveled, even against the backdrop of their current circumstance. Eli looked Joel up and down as he mimed washing his hands using just water. “Everything alright there, buddy?” Joel wondered if Eli ever washed his hands.
After a beat of silence, Joel shifted his mouth into the expression men use when they want to cry, but know that society isn’t cool with it. “Georgia’s gone.” The words just sat there for a moment. “Four years. Intern to designer to art director.” A person they both knew and worked with for years, now defined only by their job title and termination date.
Eli hopped up and took a seat on the counter, perched on the edge of the faux marble. His sneakers tapped the glossy, white cabinets with little, rhythmic taps. He wore his new white cotton socks with the little yellow stripe. They actually fit the stark whiteness of the room well, and the little yellow stripe was a nice case for tenderness in the moment. A pop of comforting color.
“Thirty people,” he said, and let the number sit between them. “That’s how many people they handed pink slips.”
Suddenly, their phones vibrated, buzzing on the counter, demanding each of their attention. Two jarring buzzes, at nearly the same time, knocked on the counter. The message had no punctuation, which made it worse.
gordon wants to see you in his office
It was a Pam special, an HR woman who knew how to always keep it neutral. But when you get a text with no emoji, no indication of tone, your mind always goes to the worst-case scenario. Joel assumed the message should read like the shocked face emoji with the big eyes. Or did that one get reworked by Apple in iOS 8?
If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.
Every Wednesday, Open Woods tracks the cultural moments worth paying attention to. Curated weekly for brands that want to move first.
Every Friday, The Business of Advertising shares lessons from over a decade working on the front lines of advertising.
Every Sunday, Above the Fold breaks down what’s running in advertising, what’s landing, and what’s a total disaster.
Photo Credit: Vadim Babenko
This is making me miss working out of a cubicle.
I spit out my coffee at "The Slack channel for #wins was quiet." Loved that line.