head honcho at Facebook), to the power of ten. Later I would need to invent a reason as to why the brief hadn’t arrived. I would drop her an email, and say that some other agency had got it instead.
The other problem I had with work was the fact that there seemed to be resentment coming from the younger generation. The previous Thursday during one of our ‘Share & Care Hours’ (you had to take a colleague you didn’t know out for coffee), a young man had informed me that Gen X were to blame for everything that was wrong with our country – the flagging economy, corporate greed and corruption, not enough cheap, good quality housing in urban areas. He listed everything about my generation that he despised, whilst I quietly drank my coffee and reassured him that I wasn’t personally responsible and weren’t these coffee brainstorms supposed to be uplifting for us both?
There was a part of me that felt that there was some jealousy perhaps – we’d had fun, it was true (the travel had felt exciting for a while) and we’d been hedonistic (yes, me definitely, from what I could remember) and raved and all that, and now this generation were spending their youth taking photos of their food. The only office banter seemed to involve food or food-related activities.
There was a new Korean street food shop opening.
There was a place that sold seaweed soaked in gin.
There was a stall selling kimchi that had been aged for four years straight.
I loved eating as much as the next person, but where were the wild nights spent getting off with strangers? Or losing footwear whilst moshing at the front of a gig? Food was for old people who couldn’t dance anymore. My generation had eaten chips and didn’t worry about their ‘carb-load’. We didn’t find food sexy. We avoided it and spent our money elsewhere – fags and booze, mainly. Every time I went into the kitchen I braced myself for a lecture on the best coffee beans to buy (Jamaican, £12.99 a bag) and why I couldn’t continue using Nescafé.
About seven years in, I’d started getting the itch to leave Mango-Lab. I had a few different ideas but none of them had much of a commercial angle. These included:
A Rock and Roll café, selling cupcakes inspired by seventies rock legends; a risotto takeaway business, with hot risotto delivered to your desk, ‘Risotto to Go for the Days When Risotto is too Slow’; a vintage brooch dealership, this was very niche but at the time I lived in Ladbroke Grove, and admired Portobello market. I wanted to be one of those cool, bohemian women in long fur coats who sold knick-knacks and nattered to one another all day. That was the thing with cool jobs. They were often poorly paid. Though some would claim my job was cool too, I guess.
Whilst it wasn’t as bad as some industries, marketing could still be a relatively sexist industry. If you were a woman, it made sense not to put your neck out or say anything too controversial. If you were a man you had to do the opposite. Early on in my career there’d been a male colleague (long gone now – he’d been head-hunted to work in advertising), who constantly scratched his balls whilst waiting by the printer. After scratching for a couple of minutes, he’d then lift his palm and sniff. It was a low-down, dog-like behaviour, but nobody said anything as he was seen to be a ‘creative genius’ and said ‘fuck’ a lot in boring meetings, which created a lot of excitement. I knew early on that this tactic wouldn’t work for me.
A woman scratching herself and swearing wasn’t the done thing. It seemed like men had more leeway to be themselves. Swearing became a bit of a trend. The ball scratching didn’t take off but instead there was lots of expansive body language that the men used to take up as much space as possible. The women who did well were of two ilks; pretty and hard-working to the point of nervous breakdown, or un-feeling and robotic. I had built my career on being sort of okay-looking (blonde, blue eyes, enormous arse), and saying ‘that’s interesting’ a lot. I made very high quality cups of tea.
I listened to boring men and told them they were right just so they’d shut up. I sometimes imagined what size penises they had. Other times I drew pictures of penises on my writing pad as they spoke. It was a small form of rebellion. It was a counterpoint to being so nice and not itching my fanny by the printer. Phoebe was different of course, because she had the stamina of a horse, and didn’t buy into the whole people-pleasing thing.
If people were thirsty in a meeting then their mouths could remain dry and their spittle stuck in the corners. If a man swore then she mirrored this language right back to him. She was the only woman I knew who could actually play golf (and enjoyed it). She was old school in that way and had gotten into it to infiltrate the old boys’ network (most male clients still loved golf). She also did long distance running. If I ever worked late (this was rare), I’d catch her running past with her laptop jiggling up and down in her rucksack, wearing a neon T-shirt that said ‘LET’S DO THIS.’
Overall at Mango-Lab, even if you set the sexism to one side, the priority was ‘high-quality strategic thinking’, which basically meant well-written decks on Pot Noodles, fizzy drinks and eye creams, peppering these presentations pulled together on PowerPoint, which we called ‘decks’, with one or two words that the client didn’t understand, so they came away with the feeling that you were cleverer than them and they were lucky to have listened to you for well over an hour.
Phoebe and I were the same age, but she came across as far more put together.
I really wasn’t happy this particular Monday. That wasn’t unusual.
I had a creeping sense of unease. I had become a ball of the stuff.
A FEW HOURS HAD passed and I was trying to write the final presentation for a project I’d just finished.
The client wanted to launch a wipe that cleaned a baby’s bottom and also made them fall asleep. The name of the product was ‘Goodnight Bum’ and there was some mocked-up packaging and a potential scent idea (Lavender and Tea Tree oil). It was ambitious but had legs, or at least that was my argument. You see parents will always seek out anything that promises sleep, and nowadays we all believe there’s a product that can fix anything. I’d interviewed twelve groups of mums in focus groups. They all reacted the same way. At first, they’d found the idea appalling (they were worried about the cleaning/sleeping benefit – was there some secret/toxic ingredient?) but I needed to come up with a positive slant for this presentation. Clients don’t like to be told that their idea is shit. It’s just like when a child holds up their drawing for approval. You try and be diplomatic and find something you do like – You’ve drawn a cat with eight legs. How lovely! It’s a spider cat. Don’t cry, love. It’s brilliant!
‘The ‘Goodnight Bum’ proposition is both challenging and disruptive,’ I typed into PowerPoint.
I sipped my coffee. I didn’t have my headphones on, but there was complete silence in the office. I often wondered why we didn’t all work from home. It would save a lot of money and wasted travel time. At least the quiet afforded me some thinking space.
‘The challenge for ‘Goodnight Bum’ is to find a sweet spot between calming and cleansing.’
My phone buzzed with an incoming text. ‘Bella has sustained a small head injury whilst hanging off the climbing frame but we applied a cold compress and she seems to be in good health,’ it said.
I felt a surge of panic. Nursery had been sending texts for some time now. I still felt it was more appropriate to speak to the parent, but
