In the spirit of Halloween, this Cranky Case File tells the tale of my first-ever meeting with a new VP of communications—an encounter that might have scared me shitless had I not already had one foot out the door . . .
My colleagues say I have great timing—a knack for leaving companies just before it hits the fan.
It was true on at least one occasion. Some years ago, I was writing for an in-house marketing department and had just given my two-weeks’ notice when we got our first look at the new VP of communications.
Man, she was something.
Her first order of business was to take a giant, florid dump all over my (nearly final) copy for the company’s annual report. She came upstairs to talk with me and everything.
Normally, this discussion would have set off all my internal alarms. Because this person, who had allegedly spent several years as the editor of a major publication, marked and said the strangest things.
Is “first aid” a trademark? she wondered. Should it be capitalized? Why had I used all those (serial) commas that made her so crazy? She didn’t know when to use that vs. which, so she circled them all. Why, when I had set in lowercase all job titles that did not precede a person’s name, had I not lowercased “CEO”?
There was more. My favorite was: “This ‘1’ looks like a lowercase letter ‘L.’”
Hey, you’re right! Sorry, my left hand must have slipped while I was typing “1” and my right hand typed an L by mistake. Great catch!
(This reminded me of a story I’d heard from one of my copywriter colleagues about a client who complained about an asterisk in his copy because it had five points instead of six.)
Although this new VP blustered on and on about how she didn’t know the answers, she was just new and asking questions, golly gee, don’t mind me—I got quite a different impression.
“This is bad,” she’d said, a moment after introducing herself, as she handed me the draft. My initial reaction was that she thought my work was terribly lacking. She followed up unconvincingly by saying her marks looked bad, but again—“I’m just new, I’m just asking questions.”
(A week later, she would kill off all of the work I had done for a company rebranding effort. As I remember, she wrinkled her nose and groaned as she read my proposed tagline—a close formulation of which, incidentally, a much larger and more successful company would later roll out and use for many years as the cornerstone of its own national branding. It’s impossible that you did not hear that tagline hundreds of times.)
I took her comments all in good humor—outwardly, at least—smiling, indulging her questions, and saying how glad we were in Marketing to receive her feedback.
At one point, when one of her “casual” questions hung in the air, practically begging—no, definitely demanding—an answer, I offered one and gently supported it with evidence from our style guide.
“Oh, then you can STET that, I guess,” she said almost sadly. Then she cocked her head and gave me a pitying look. “Do you know what STET means?”
As a professional copywriter for more than 20 years, I had some idea.
The marketing director stopped by afterward to see what all the fuss was about. I just smiled and said, “You’re going to have your hands full.”
I had eight more days to go.
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