Stolen Saturday

Nobody ever really fancies working on a Saturday. Let’s face it. No one really does but if you do fancy it, well, you officially have no life.

So, I did make plans for today, which sadly I had to cancel and drive 16km thru the Saturday traffic and head up to the office. Because on Monday we have a bloody presentation with a big-time client who’s kind enough to actually throw a project at us. Without needing to pitch for it.

Man, have we come a long way since then. I remember a time when we have to compete among other agencies to secure ourselves an account. I recall lots of late nights, overdoing the concepts, the ideas and the visuals just so we stand out. And the dreaded ‘being compared to the other agencies’ work.

The thing is, we kinda suck at pitching. OK, I admit it, we suck horribly at it. As far as I remember, we’ve never secured an account thru pitching. We try too hard. However, we relish the prospect when an account is thrown at our direction, without the need to pitch. Gift-wrapped and handed to us, “Here, our budget is X-amount, go crazy!” they’d say. Well, something like that anyway. And always, we’d soar. That’s how we secured the next account. Thru networking.

So here we are, another project handed to us, gift-wrapped and it’s Saturday. With 2 more days to go, our presentation is nowhere near completion. In fact, we haven’t even decided the range of logos for option 3. I haven’t quite got around finishing the bullshit rationale for the product name and the 3 sets of logos we’re proposing. Each set contains 3 options. To make matters worst, the 3 of us are completely clueless with PowerPoint.

You know me, I resent anything that’s Microsoft. Simply for its sheer unreliability, its tacky templates and cheesy attempt to emulate OS X, “Why not we use Preview? I mean, we’re using Macs, the average-Joe would be blown away just looking at the desktop,” I suggest. But for some reason no one agreed, “I mean, it’s not like we’re gonna type anything, right?” I tried to justify my reason, “Everything is gonna be in JPEG, so why the hell not?”

In the old days, we do our presentation the old-fashion way, print out hard copies and mount it on a black A1 size mounting board. I got the impression, since another client of ours have exhausted our resources when he demanded 3-5 sets of a actual sized, actual material mock-up of his booklet throughout the course of 2 weeks, we’re running kinda dry. Besides, digital presentations are way easier to prepare, and well, it doesn’t cost a cent.

However, right now, I don’t really care if it’s Powerpoint or whatever. I just want to get this over with and get on with preparing my presentation speech. Because the last outing we had was simply ghastly. Not only did the designer and I froze in front of the board of directors, the cat caught the boss’ tongue as well. On top of that, the last presentation I did that actually went well was ummm, shit, I can’t even remember. Yeah, it was THAT long ago. So…


Here goes. A working Saturday. And the 16-bloody-kilometers drive.


Happy Saturday. Or whatever.