Life After OZY: Doing the Post-Grift Drift
They say there are no second acts in American lives, but even after Justice Dept and SEC investigations were opened on Le Affair OZY, it seems there might be.
“Go home.”
It was Christmas Eve.
Wait. No it wasn’t. It was after lunch on Christmas eve. There was no Eve about it yet.
I was sitting at my desk jamming away. Had a whole issue of a magazine to get out of the door and not being an ass did the only thing a not-ass would do: let the whole staff go home. It wasn’t the martyr in me that made me do what they should have been doing. It was the spectrum guy in me who knew he’d never be able to enjoy any kind of Christmas Eve knowing it hadn’t been done.
Besides which my kids and their mom were already out Christmas Eve’ing somewhere so what was I going to do? Sit at home and wish I was doing what I was doing?
“Go home.” I glanced up at the speaker, made a mental note that I had never noticed that he reminded me of Barney Rubble of all people as he stood in the doorway of my office, and I waved my hand with an accompanying grunt and a “yeah, yeah”.
“…I gotta finish this. And then I will.”
He would not be appeased. “Really. Go HOME!” I got it. It made him look bad if he left but I stayed, but his issue of a related publication was done. Mine was…getting there.
This time though there was a little steel in his voice. I mean he was having a FIGHT book moment where clearly we had trundled into man v. man territory, but while he had been at the company 20 years longer than I had, I knew my org chart business and knew this was not his action to command. In other words: we were peers. Not subordinate and boss.
…[F]ear was aswirl in the heads of some of the hard-working journos who were caught up in the backdraft of the attempted Goldman Sachs $40 mil graft. Fear of retaliation…
“I will.” It was going to be easier — re: get me to finish faster — to appear to agree.
“Now!” he said.
That was it. I stopped typing. Pushed back from my desk and looked at him, full face. And smiling.
“I will. When I’m finished. But if I don’t what are you going to do? Beat me up?”
We stared at each other. He finally shrugged and cursed, spun on his heels and left.
“I’ll text you when I’m finished, man.” I hollered after him. I didn’t want him to leave angry. I just wanted him to leave. So I could finish.
But the whole issue of fear and the marshalling of that fear, insofar as it’s connected to the 2021 workplace is very much a now-conversation.
Especially now, since when OZY imploded as it had/has, fear was aswirl in the heads of some of the hard-working journos who were caught up in the backdraft of the attempted Goldman Sachs $40 mil graft. Fear of retaliation from inside, fear of association from the outside and underneath it all, at least in my case, what kind of journalist did it make you for this to not be a story you had twigged well before it broke somewhere else?
Or more precisely, like the horror movie meme suggests: how could we not have known the calls were coming from inside the house?
Morbid self-attentions that filled the days of subsequent revelations about falsified numbers, toxic workplace action, and then finally, the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) opening of investigations. And, undergirding it all, a question: if where there’s smoke, there’s also fire, how employable were we really?
And on cue, the email notifications started dinging.
To paraphrase Bukowski, now I’m not saying we were any good, but five film companies, three production houses, and four media properties seemed to feel differently, at least in my case, my downbeat assessments aside.
So from hell and an absence of riches to an abundance of the same, minus the hell part. And the calculus had totally changed. From what will I do to what should I do? And emails and DMs full of folks wishing me the best because something good/better/best was just around the corner. Which seems to be the kind of thing you hear before you don’t hear much of anything any more.
Then a call from Ruby, daughter #2.
[O]n a parallel path, a call from my mother, sort of like hearing from Moses in the end: “Media is dead.”
First some background: in the absence of a job at Wieden + Kennedy, her repeated entreaties that they should do the genius thing and hire her were eventually heeded. They didn’t hire her full time but brought her on as an intern. Three weeks after she graduated from Pitzer. [Side note: it took me 17 months to get my first career job after Stanford. I’m just saying…]
So weeks after she started as an intern co-founder David Kennedy, he of the back end of Wieden + Kennedy, gave her a personal recommendation that was significant enough that they hired her as a brand strategist. That’s not why she was calling though. She was calling to give me some advice.
“Take the job Dad.”
I hadn’t been especially vocal about the fact that I was looking for one and since Le Affair OZY, had just been weathering offers, but how she had heard of one of the ones I was more seriously entertaining? Total mystery, how.
“Eliza works there and she told me.”
And on a parallel path, a call from my mother, sort of like hearing from Moses in the end: “Media is dead.” And beyond that, “no one wants to pay for it, they’re always folding and who needs the stress?”
And then Ruby again and a longer philosophical discussion about how someone so inherently creative — I’ve watched Ruby while chatting about things totally unrelated carve sculptures out of soap. As a goof! — and geared toward an interest in social issues could ever find satisfaction at an ad agency.
The answer? Some variation of, if you want to change the conversation, in America at least, you start HERE.
I start to scoff and then… “don’t cook tonight, call Chicken Delight!”…and beyond that "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should…” and to top it off, “By MENNEN!”
I have family members whose names I’ve forgotten but commercial jingles from 1968? Live on, still, in my head.
So I sent an email accepting the job and so tomorrow it will be announced: I’m Assistant Vice President, Marketing Content at WONGDOODY, the curiously named (after the founders) but able competitor to not only Wieden + Kennedy but Accenture Interactive, and Deloitte. Specializing in? What they’re calling the “human experience.”
And I’m a human. With experience.
So, finally, for those who had been wondering how the hero made out in the end, the answer has just now appeared: just fine.