The Blonde Leaves

The Blonde Leaves

I’m in my twenties and in my cube at EJL.

I have a Merlin phone handset pressed against my ear. I’m listening to a sales rep as I’m now a media buyer. This means I’m trusted to lie on the company’s behalf. I’ve been trained to lie as the key negotiation skill. It’s easy: look at the truth, reduce that number to what you’d rather it be, and then be antisocial until you get it.

The social part isn’t working and the sales rep is frustrated with me. Media buying is dominated by women as it’s a high-paying job and the only requirements seem to be a tendency for lifelong regret, anger management issues and the ability to drink without passing out or puking.

His normal tactic to getting what he wants is to come into the office. He is handsome and he’s often invited to do that. He’ll bring food in and say he can’t do anything about his costs. He’s rich and it’s working for him.

The gender dynamics and the fact that I was taken made his job much harder, but I’m listening. I look over the cubes and see yellow sticky notes on each monitor except mine. This is something that I don’t need but am useful for.

Each yellow sticky, placed in the lower left corner (best practice), has a single decimal listed: 1.176447. This is one of the first things you might receive from a media buying mentor and you’ll be using it constantly. I don’t have one on mine, but people often ask me, if they lost their sticky, to tell them what it was. (This was an emergency. No sticky = No work.)

The placement of this number on most, if not all, people’s monitors was a mystery at first and I know what it is for. If you are working with “net costs,” the product of “net costs” and this magic number is “gross cost.” Conversely, the product of 0.85 (easier number to remember) and “gross cost” is “net cost.” Division is commonly understood to make numbers smaller (carving things into pieces) and dividing by a fraction hurts the brain. Multiplying to make a number bigger is preferred, but you needed to make sure your sticky had enough digits so that cents are in precision.

I look over at Steeeeeve’s cube. He’s not there and I’ve heard his job was at risk. The agency was in a death spiral and everybody knew that we all had dates over our head and I wanted to leave before my palm started to blink red.

Then I see him and I see his palm flashing red. He has something bulky and green in his pocket but I can’t make it out. He has his prized nameplate in a box, which was great when you could put it in front of a desk. In a cube, it’s just narcissism.

I tell the handsome sales guy something antisocial and hang up.

He’s hurting. We make nothing and now he doesn’t even have that. He doesn’t deserve this pain as he’s done nothing to earn it. I knew we would need to part and I’d been hiding a gift for him. A “handle” of his favorite gin. He offers his hand to shake it. He pretends we have distance. “Nice to have worked with you.” I laugh lightly as that’s just BS corpo-speak and he knows it.

I give him the gin, Tanqueray, a large green bottle. He’s thankful and says “this is just what I need,” and I made that mistake as well later.