Read Online Magical Thinking by Augusten Burroughs - Free Book Online
Authors: Augusten Burroughs
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writing AmtrakTV spots. I was drinking double espressos and really trying to be positive instead of enraged and spoiled. One of my problems is that I have completely disconnected those blue envelopes my paycheck arrives in with doing any actual work.
So I wrote all about the
experience
of Amtrak. About how you can drink chardonnay ten feet from an alligator or cross the desert in your pajamas. The whole thing turned out to be very Zen, because I really got lost in the writing. When I read the scripts to my boss, who has a habit of shoving his fist through walls, he said, “That’s fucking great shit, man. Cowboy poetry.”
I liked this comment because it made me feel sensitive yet masculine, like a professional bodybuilder who collects porcelain figurines.
The client, however, didn’t agree. She was furious. “It’s not about the chardonnay or the crocodiles; it’s about the fare. It’s about $158.00 round-trip to Boston.”
And she was really bitchy about it, too. We had served excellent cookies and espresso in the meeting, and I wanted to reach across the table and take her cookie away. “Give that Mint Milano back, you bitch. If you can’t at least be polite, you don’t get a treat.”
Here is a woman who is solely responsible for the brand image of Amtrak, our nation’s flagship railroad, and she’s wearing a tacky pantsuit from QVC and twelve-dollar shoes. She sat back in her chair like a trucker and complained, “Why the hell don’t you talk about the new engines we got? We got all new engines on most of our trains. Why can’t you say, ‘Come aboard and experience our new engines.’ Why can’t you talk about that if you don’t wanna talk about the price?”
I smiled and very calmly said, “Because people don’t ride in the engine. They don’t care. All they care about is what they see out the window and will they get where they’re going on time.”
She glared at me and said, “I don’t want you working on my business.”
Likewise, bitch.
And from now on I fly everywhere.
I wasn’t always this bitter and gangrenous. I got my first job as an advertising copywriter when I was nineteen, four months after I moved to San Francisco. I had long, curly hair and wore sunglasses at all times, which in the mid-eighties felt totally rad. I was so thrilled to not be pumping gas at a Getty station that I arrived in the office at four-thirty in the morning and left at midnight.
One of my first projects was to write a print ad for a potato.
The National Potato Board needed to replace its current ad, which featured a potato covered in thick, green latex paint and the headline “What must we do to make you realize we’re a vegetable?” This was when they were trying to reverse the perception that potatoes were just junk food.
The new strategy was all about speed. Microwave ovens were relatively new, so speed was exciting news. And potatoes were known to be slow. So I did an ad that featured a potato in a wind tunnel, like a car. The headline was “Aerodynamically designed for speed.”
The potato people were very happy. They bought the ad, and then they needed me to write the actual body copy.
For this, I would need a recipe. So I contacted the woman at the ad agency who was in charge of getting me a very fast recipe for a potato, and she kept telling me, “I’ll get it to you tomorrow.”
She was a very busy woman who lived on a houseboat in Sausalito, and understandably, my potato recipe was just not a top priority. So in place of a real recipe, I wrote my own temporary place-holder recipe. It read: “Just slice a potato, broil for ten minutes, then sprinkle liberally with parmesan or blue.” Which is exactly how the ad ran in magazines.
It was one of those things that just slipped through the cracks. And nobody even noticed until
Adweek
magazine did asmall article about my clever potato ad. They liked the visual. They liked the headline. They questioned the recipe. “We’ll have
So I wrote all about the
experience
of Amtrak. About how you can drink chardonnay ten feet from an alligator or cross the desert in your pajamas. The whole thing turned out to be very Zen, because I really got lost in the writing. When I read the scripts to my boss, who has a habit of shoving his fist through walls, he said, “That’s fucking great shit, man. Cowboy poetry.”
I liked this comment because it made me feel sensitive yet masculine, like a professional bodybuilder who collects porcelain figurines.
The client, however, didn’t agree. She was furious. “It’s not about the chardonnay or the crocodiles; it’s about the fare. It’s about $158.00 round-trip to Boston.”
And she was really bitchy about it, too. We had served excellent cookies and espresso in the meeting, and I wanted to reach across the table and take her cookie away. “Give that Mint Milano back, you bitch. If you can’t at least be polite, you don’t get a treat.”
Here is a woman who is solely responsible for the brand image of Amtrak, our nation’s flagship railroad, and she’s wearing a tacky pantsuit from QVC and twelve-dollar shoes. She sat back in her chair like a trucker and complained, “Why the hell don’t you talk about the new engines we got? We got all new engines on most of our trains. Why can’t you say, ‘Come aboard and experience our new engines.’ Why can’t you talk about that if you don’t wanna talk about the price?”
I smiled and very calmly said, “Because people don’t ride in the engine. They don’t care. All they care about is what they see out the window and will they get where they’re going on time.”
She glared at me and said, “I don’t want you working on my business.”
Likewise, bitch.
And from now on I fly everywhere.
I wasn’t always this bitter and gangrenous. I got my first job as an advertising copywriter when I was nineteen, four months after I moved to San Francisco. I had long, curly hair and wore sunglasses at all times, which in the mid-eighties felt totally rad. I was so thrilled to not be pumping gas at a Getty station that I arrived in the office at four-thirty in the morning and left at midnight.
One of my first projects was to write a print ad for a potato.
The National Potato Board needed to replace its current ad, which featured a potato covered in thick, green latex paint and the headline “What must we do to make you realize we’re a vegetable?” This was when they were trying to reverse the perception that potatoes were just junk food.
The new strategy was all about speed. Microwave ovens were relatively new, so speed was exciting news. And potatoes were known to be slow. So I did an ad that featured a potato in a wind tunnel, like a car. The headline was “Aerodynamically designed for speed.”
The potato people were very happy. They bought the ad, and then they needed me to write the actual body copy.
For this, I would need a recipe. So I contacted the woman at the ad agency who was in charge of getting me a very fast recipe for a potato, and she kept telling me, “I’ll get it to you tomorrow.”
She was a very busy woman who lived on a houseboat in Sausalito, and understandably, my potato recipe was just not a top priority. So in place of a real recipe, I wrote my own temporary place-holder recipe. It read: “Just slice a potato, broil for ten minutes, then sprinkle liberally with parmesan or blue.” Which is exactly how the ad ran in magazines.
It was one of those things that just slipped through the cracks. And nobody even noticed until
Adweek
magazine did asmall article about my clever potato ad. They liked the visual. They liked the headline. They questioned the recipe. “We’ll have
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