Two years, two months and two weeks

Sorry I will start by saying this is poorly written because it came out in a gush.

It’s hard to believe it was over two years ago that I first wrote about what a twilight zone I work in. It’s amazing what you become accustomed to and what you will take as normal because it becomes your entire life. I don’t see it as bad that I let it be my entire life. 2009 was the best year of my life. I got promoted a couple of times and demoted once before the first promotion. I struggled and learned and was praised for great worked and cussed at for mistakes. My job was my entire social life, and I think that’s pretty lucky.

There were some pretty hilarious and entertaining times. There was the time my boss burst into the other executive’s office singing “Bake Sale Betty!” and asked his assistant to book a charter bus to take us to have fried chicken sandwiches at Bake Sale Betty in Oakland in the middle of the work day. The was the huge chrome dome buses with the vinyl floor, amps, bucket of booze and absolutely no seats, just a dance floor. There were the jello shots and summer beer before the bus ride that took us to a ranch in the hills of Marin where I reigned as the all-agency mechanical bull riding champion. The executives passed us blunts as we listened to the live band commissioned just for us. On the way back we turned the bus into the sweatiest, loudest dance club I’ve been in. As we barreled down through the hills on the curvy road, our night club music blared and we rolled from side to side, holding the roof to keep from falling over. Once we crossed back over the Golden Gate bridge and into the financial district, we kept our dancing going, the music just as loud as we stuck our sweaty faces out the window to smile at the grim expressions on office-workers’ faces as they lined up for their bus ride home. There was the Christmas party, climbing a statue with my boss Mike and setting off the alarms, dancing until five in the morning, thinking it was a good idea to put a cupcake in my jacket pocket to eat later. There was the next morning when Google sent us breakfast burritos and we sat around the kitchen table, eating, laughing, gossiping like college students hung-over, ashamed of each other but never ashamed to tell every juicy detail. Michelle passed around pictures of her making out with the French caterer who was later found on the internet in a sex scandal law suit. She even showed these pictures to the creative executive Jim, who it’s her job to assist. The executives languished over the details of the ex-model Lindsey making out with the female bartender that was licking spilled liquor off the bar, crying because someone called her “Jersey Shore” and dick grabbing every man with a wedding band. The new digital planner, (the guy who gets paid to tweet and blog and foursquare and facebook for our brands) told us all about the married, swinging finance woman and her bold inquiry to fuck in the photo booth. With all his shock and modesty, I reminded him how he tried to suck vodka out of my hair when he’d spilled it on me the night before. Then there were the late nights drinking wine and eating chocolate in the all-glass executive office, sprawling on the couches as the sun turned the sky over the bay pink, and the water deepened it’s blue. There was Peter, the president, making my day every morning when he sung “here’s to you Lindsay Robinson!” or telling me I had a smile as bright as the day, that no one in the world was as sweet and as good as Torts. His Linzer Torts. There were the dance nights with Adriana and her friends, the nights arm in arm with Melissa, where she was shocked that a man was peeing in the urinal in what she thought was the women’s bathroom. There was her explaining to us all the drinking games you can play with a turkey baster. There were brandy shots, limo rides from bars to expensive dinners on the agency, steak and endless wine and appetizers. There was cutting VIP lines, there were concerts at the Fox in Oakland watching from the VIP section. There was sitting between Mindy and Amy, two of the sweetest girls I know, and all three of us so happy, calling ourselves Love Row as we gushed about the men we were in love with and supported each other, laughed with each other, drank wine at our desks, watched YouTube together, played chat roulette on the work computers and blasting Peter’s favorite songs as he praised his three wonderful girls and went singing down the halls. Then Mindy quit and got engaged and Amy went to live with her boyfriend in LA. Dominique quit to move in with her boyfriend in New Orleans and Melissa quit and moved to Pittsburgh. Kate quit to move in with her boyfriend in Chicago. Lizeth and Megan quit. Courtney got laid off, Peter got promoted to BBDO Europe and occasionally sends emails from Moscow, Paris, Venice, Vienna and London.. Alexa quit because it stressed her out. Sarah got laid off. The other Sarah got laid off too. Danielle got laid off. Allie got laid off. Bernice quit after crying every day for four months. Marcus and Elizabeth got laid off. Jon Soto, the one who told me I was going to become a voice over actress and got me on regional television got laid off. In four months, I am the 28^th person gone. Our office was 70 people. It hasn’t been all bad, but there’s been a lot of bad.

My immediate boss Crystal openly admits to having “No moral scruples” and just wants to have fun. She cusses at me, slams doors and huffs and puffs and gloats at misfortune and gloats about her newly embellished title of “Deputy Head”. She tells people to fuck off if they schedule a meeting with me because they have to “fucking go through HER if they want use of my time”. She calls me on the weekends to scream at me and she comes to my house and follows me around, telling me what to do. She takes credit for all my work so that the new president thinks I am incompetent. She’s been setting that up for a long while. She and her sister are poison. When I got laid off she pulled me into her office, and with a mean smirk on her face she told me “Life’s a bitch my friend. Do you have any questions?” I didn’t. All I wanted to say was, “You should have written me a thank you note for the expensive wedding present I got you.” That and “You shouldn’t have made me clean up your cat’s shit and begged me at all hours of the night to come cat sit.” But mainly I’m mad at myself for getting taken advantage of like that. In my own house she told me I had a squirrelly face, a rodent face. She told me I had a mean spirit. She told me I "fucking sucked" at my job. Interesting that she steals my work then. Interesting that she is mean-spirited.

Some of my friends say I’m losing it. Some say my life is falling apart. Some say they are worried about me. Everyone wants to know what I’m doing, and frankly I have no clue. And I won’t know for a while. For right now I’m trying to pick up the pieces of this life that’s fallen apart and glue it back together into a totally different shape that is a better reflection of me. I try to remind myself that it’s better to be dangling naked in the wind, like underwear on a clothesline, freezing, and liable to fall, (end metaphor) but with a million possibilities in front of me, than it is to be safe and secure but unhappy every day and stagnant and know what every single day of your life will be like along that given path.

When I first took the promotion, I mentioned sinking or swimming. I don’t feel like I sank. Excuse the continuation of a cheesy metaphor, but I feel like I swam lap after lap after lap and then realized I was just in a pond and not the ocean and decided to jump out of the water altogether. No wonder I’ve spent so much time in the ocean these past two weeks…

I emailed my old boss Peter to tell him I was done at BBDO. He didn’t have to see this place turn sour when he left. He didn’t see the crying and deceit and carrying on, the rounds and rounds of lay offs, the quitting, the mass exodus and the crawling and scratching up the corporate ladder.

His email to me was incredibly nice. In it he ended by saying, “Lindsay Robinson you have the light. Burn Brightly my friend.” I will try to do that.