As the leading intellectual of a business (whether or not it's openly acknowledged to my face, since it's typically done behind my back as some sort of financial strategy), my first few days, weeks, months, and/or years of any new employment I had were fraught with difficulties, tensions, ego trips, paranoid schemes, covert meetings, and hurriedly hushed exchanges like I was just hired to run the universe instead of design some books. The grueling audition process I went through was supposed to ameliorate qualms and fears that average people have about content generators, but sadly, it did not.
I was subjected to rounds and rounds of emails, resume screenings, online questionnaires, personality profiles, psych screenings, drug tests (for a corrupt newspaper union, haha), with several more rounds of interviews with my portfolio shown to a variety of employees from different departments who would not have access to the highest levels of a house like I did, done to an insane degree. Such is the power to create a company (or destroy it) that we bring to the table as a group.
I'd always hoped that my relative openness, honesty, and transparency (in big business New York) would alleviate the troubled minds of the more pedestrian office worker vis-a-vis their limited perceptions about illuminators but, more often than not, interactions with a real genius doesn't actually make lower-level employees feel better about themselves or their career choices, which is why I often handed out books to inquiring office cows. You know: because that's what we do. Nefarious, I know.
I'd always hoped that my relative openness, honesty, and transparency (in big business New York) would alleviate the troubled minds of the more pedestrian office worker vis-a-vis their limited perceptions about illuminators but, more often than not, interactions with a real genius doesn't actually make lower-level employees feel better about themselves or their career choices, which is why I often handed out books to inquiring office cows. You know: because that's what we do. Nefarious, I know.
So, it was no surprise to me when the feathers of any new house I joined were ruffled loudly and with much angst, most acutely from the large hen-house, since we're paid less than teachers, which makes modern publishing heavy on the female workforce. Lunches would be set-up and attempted, odd scrutinies would take place in the office kitchenette, bizarrely stilted interactions were forced in the hallways or bathrooms, interruptions about a fake crisis during my crucial deadlines were staged as a sabotage...to no avail. In our world, you either make something or you don't, because the future belongs to those of us wiling to get our hands dirty, and with the amount of work that I do, it isn't a carefully calculated life of leisure devoted to one's over-priced manicure or shiny new gadget. It's more like: "I made this <pat book>. See?" Good! Now I can go back to work.
We'd published books about assholes in business, as me and the other much deafer art director in the office yelled back-and-forth, reading aloud from a book about company stereotypes, like the common "office bike": the desperate blond (always blond!) receptionist who sleeps around because "everyone gets a ride", within clear earshot of the reception area. Still, no avail. They kept on coming. Scooter was one such douchebag whose limited prowess barely masked his deeper ambitions of artistic glory, as just such an example of a tool. No one liked him, but he managed to form icky alliances within the company like we were competing for the last piece of roasted rat on a remote desert island for a sick "reality" game-show about starving people and their madness. What was the point?
He seemed genuinely baffled by my gifts, as much as he hated any kind of reference to them. He'd find some excuse to come back to the design studio, then draw out a weird discussion that could have been more easily done with a ten-second email, to slowly walk back to his cramped overheated office scratching his head about the obvious truths I just told him about the book he showed me, because acquisitions was supposed to be his game. He thought he cleverly hid his lack of a buying streak with our designated wonk at a major book retailer, by pretending to question us about a potential book property up for re-licensing like it was playtime at the zoo, and I just fucking ripped his head off in the lion cage, every single time.
Naturally, like all the other inept "lifers" at that company, he just happened to "fall into" publishing, just like he fell into my den of protective lionesses filled with nursing cubs. Shoo! On an afternoon like any other afternoon, he seemed to finally have an epiphany about who I was, discreet as I managed myself to be amongst those who are not of the calling. As the rays of golden light struck sharp shapes across the back wall of my studio desk, he came back excitedly (for once) to show me a book that just crossed his desk. Did I know it? Nope. Ah...here he hesitated, like a student daring to give an apple to his favorite teacher. Did I know this book was like me? Yes, Scott. I did. Happy All Soul's Day, on this beautiful autumn day in 2016.
He seemed genuinely baffled by my gifts, as much as he hated any kind of reference to them. He'd find some excuse to come back to the design studio, then draw out a weird discussion that could have been more easily done with a ten-second email, to slowly walk back to his cramped overheated office scratching his head about the obvious truths I just told him about the book he showed me, because acquisitions was supposed to be his game. He thought he cleverly hid his lack of a buying streak with our designated wonk at a major book retailer, by pretending to question us about a potential book property up for re-licensing like it was playtime at the zoo, and I just fucking ripped his head off in the lion cage, every single time.
Naturally, like all the other inept "lifers" at that company, he just happened to "fall into" publishing, just like he fell into my den of protective lionesses filled with nursing cubs. Shoo! On an afternoon like any other afternoon, he seemed to finally have an epiphany about who I was, discreet as I managed myself to be amongst those who are not of the calling. As the rays of golden light struck sharp shapes across the back wall of my studio desk, he came back excitedly (for once) to show me a book that just crossed his desk. Did I know it? Nope. Ah...here he hesitated, like a student daring to give an apple to his favorite teacher. Did I know this book was like me? Yes, Scott. I did. Happy All Soul's Day, on this beautiful autumn day in 2016.
