Writings
The lights have that curious blue tinge, the glow you always get from fluorescent tube lighting. This arrival lounge seems to be quite big, but when you really look at it if you put 100 people into it there would be hardly any room left.
There is only a Burger King and a French themed coffee bar available to get some food and drink and at 8am the last thing I want is a burger. So we plump for the coffee bar and order our tea coffee and toast. Scanning the arrivals screen I see that the plane we have come to meet is early, half an hour early, so it’s a good job we got here in good time.
The person we have come to meet is a stranger to me, we have never met before only ever spoken on the phone. You can tell something about a person through their voice but when you meet them all that fades into the background. You put a face to the voice, a personality to the abstract image that your mind has dreamed up. When I first saw our client she was older than I had imagined. I had thought her to be in her mid forties but she was at least ten years older than that. You could tell by her bearing that she knew what she wanted and would not suffer fools gladly. To say rather bad tempered would be exaggerating but she could certainly be short with you in that particularly North American way our cousins over the Atlantic have.
We took her bags and waited for her whilst she went to the Ladies. On the way to the car pleasantries were passed about the flight and the trip in general. The meal on the plane had been acceptable and generally speaking the whole thing had passed off without any incidents. No air rage drunken passengers or heart attack cases, just a very ordinary flight.
Driving through the Car Park she expressed an opinion about how large the airport had grown since she was last here. I quickly formed the view that I should be businesslike and to the point in order to gain respect and not to make small talk. She had a reputation for hard nosed business that was the talk of the Company so I certainly did not want to get off to a bad start. There was soon to be a megadeal going down that I could make quite a bit of commission on, no way was I going to put that in jeopardy.
There we are the three of us trundling down the motorway in silence. Then suddenly she speaks
I hate graphics I say what do you mean?
Look at car ads, how many different ways can you show a car driving down a road, there has to be a limited number of ways to show that, no matter how many different countries you go to, to drive down that road, with all the dopey camera angles and sets and stuff. That’s what graphics is about. Selling you the same thing again and again. An excellent example is soap powder. Detergent companies have been selling detergent/soap for a long time, the product has hardly changed, and every year new admen come along to try and sell it or advertise it to you in a different way, but they get stuck. Even the brightest of them get stuck, they get stuck with the reality of trying to advertise soap. There’s only ONE way to advertise soap and that’s the way we’ve got, there is no other way, you give it to somebody who uses it and they say how great it is, that’s it.
Well, there’s me, driving, and I’m thinking, FUCK, what is she on about? I mean I know really, she thinks advertising is a load of shit and she’s making her point through using car ads and soap ads as the proof. But…and she is right.
After that short silence….. of about 30 seconds whilst I was digesting what she had just said she then said And that’s not all……. I also can’t stand music that revolves around the Bass Drum, that is the Bass Drum in a Drumkit also known as the Kickdrum, although why it should be known as a Kickdrum I’ll never know, I mean you don’t kick the bloody thing do you? This bloody dum dum dum all the time and everywhere is enough to send a normal person insane.
I’m sat there, listening to all this, and I’m thinking YEAH I TOTALLY AGREE WITH YOU. YOU ARE RIGHT. But I couldn’t make myself say anything to her to agree or disagree and I didn’t disagree I just agreed but I couldn’t damn well say anything.
The next thing she says is It’s all the fault of Drum Machines, to be a drummer requires some skill and dexterity, it requires talent to use those sticks and touch that drumskin with the tips of those sticks and paradiddle with the left hand or the right hand or indeed both hands.
I’m thinking, how the fuck does this woman know anything about drumming, but she does and she carries on to say
You can’t program a drum machine to play Jazz.
And it’s probably a good thing that you can’t because if you could, Jazz would get a lot worse.
So where does Rock stand? My Membrane!
And if you could program machines to play classical music, God forbid, it would seem so tuneless and dead, who would want to do it? Other than to say that they were the first to do it and OH YEAH I was the first person to program Beethoven into a machine. FUCK THAT.
And the North American accent carried on through this, it had to, she was the one, she had the deal.
I realised at this time there was nothing to be gained by running with the pack, there’s no respect there. Run and you will continue to run. She was showing me how.
She was showing me how to be the man I should be, but doing it on the quiet. No helicopters for me. You are far too important for that, these were the silly thoughts going round that night in my head, as I was driving down the motorway, towards
Yes, the bit you should ignore, the important bit, is the most important bit,