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Notes on a Napkin

Posted by Roger on September 9, 2008
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You can call the following “Mad Men and me.” If I knew then what I know now about advertising, I might never have become a journalist. When I watch that show, all I can think is what a great life! What great looking women, even the mousy ones! What fun drinking on the job in the office and smoking in the office and, more importantly, drinking after hours. We did some of that in TV journalism where I spent my career, but never with the panache as depicted on that popular show. Drinking as a TV journalist usually had a more desperate quality to it. I have to admit that I worked briefly at an advertising agency when I was doing graduate work at NYU. My job was menial. My hands were dirty. But I did wear a suit even though I was in the mailroom. It was not much of a job. Not really. I delivered the mail to people outside the mailroom and I spent a lot of time at the post office sending out the taped commercials produced in the small agency where I worked. Remember, this was in the days before landline, satellites and digital that now allows agencies to send commercials through the air for little cost. The agency I worked at produced 15 minute long commercials that it mailed to stations around the country looking to fill airtime because they lacked what TV executives call “product.” I didn’t stay around long enough to find out how successful (or not) those commercials were, but I know that my arms grew weary from lugging boxes of filmed, yes, filmed, commercials to the post office, standing on line to send them around the country, and then paying cash to the United States government for the privilege of allowing it to carry these cultural artifacts to stations everywhere. After three months, I grew tired of the job and quit. I took another part-time job selling advertising space for a maritime publication. That didn’t work out so well either and is a story for another day.

Is the so-called Obama fatigue something created by columnists who have their own campaign fatigue, and thus too much time on their hands? Or, is the idea of fatigue during this lengthy political season something concocted by a pollster who has run out of ideas and questions to ask people who are all too willing to offer their two cents about almost anything?

Talk about fatigue! I believe there is no fatigue that matched the current reporting from China, and worse the coverage of the Olympics. China will be there forever. Luckily the Olympics only come once in four years and even that seems too soon between medals.

I don’t know any of the self-proclaimed pundits, most of whom are hard-working journalists, currently pontificating on the presidential campaign. I assume without knowing for certain, that his or her take on Barack Obama and John McCain is a reflection of his or her bias, confusion, and self-absorption about their own lives, thus life in general. How else can it be that one writer sees arrogance in a candidate and another writer reads the same appearance as modesty? I want to believe it is more than red and blue states. Though I am not naïve, I would like to believe that objectivity still exists. Doesn’t it?

Why do political columnists seemingly have the right to decide the meaning and direction of a campaign without using a single source to support their meandering musings? Must be high summer, attendant heavy humidity, and crowded campaign buses.

It is obvious that cable channels have names rather than numbers because it is the only way to tell one from another. Numbers would be more fun and we would have an idea how many channels the cable providers are really selling us. Especially when they raise the price each year and blame the rise in costs on expensive new programming. Do cable operators ever look at the fare they put on their channels?

From my nephew Darryl about my “Notebooks” now appearing here and on the DVN Blog. He said, “It's pretty amazing to have that glimpse. I remember having many of the same thoughts in college. I suppose the year doesn't matter, we tend to all be at similar places in development while in college.” Those words say that what I experienced and wrote about does resonate with people no matter how old.

Here is another random thought. Would gyms exist if there were no mirrors? And is this a metaphor about life? What if each health club had one mirror and people had to get in line to use it and all could watch a person preening to see if they had had success after a workout? Would this, too, be a metaphor for life?

Notebooks part 6 by Ron Steinman It’s easier to take disappointment, a failure, defeat, censure, when you are pessimistic. Pr...

Notes on a Napkin

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