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I started as a copywriter in the print era of the 1970s. I'm nostalgic for the feeling of being on a dynamic team. Maybe it will never happen to me again.
It certainly didn't happen at Zircon.
All I can think of to do now is explain myself and what I can do. Make a clean breast of it.
What is the truth of the matter.
I was a magazine editor, and then I landed a job writing TV, radio, and print advertising for Dodge cars and trucks at the BBDO ad agency in Detroit. I chafed inside the big agency because it was required to set aside your creative integrity in order to accommodate office politics.
The one time I finally was able to present my ideas to the Chrysler committee, I won them over to my point of view and all the way back to the office the Dodge Truck manager was beside himself complimenting me on my presentation and the outcome.
Then we got back to the office and everybody looked like they'd been hit with a baseball bat: Lee Iaccoca had fired the whole agency.
So much for my plan. I had plenty of job offers from the other Detroit ad agencies, but I was sick of the town and I fled back to Santa Barbara and eked out a life as a freelance copywriter/creative director in the old print media. I got my first computer in 1982, but then when I got my first Macintosh with a laser printer in 1987, I fell in love with Photoshop and Pagemaker. My focus drifted away from copywriting more toward desktop publishing.
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In 1994 I moved to San Francisco and, starting from scratch, I found clients and resumed my freelance writing career. Then I suffered a severe leg injury in a bicycle accident and was unable to complete my writing assignments. When I regained mobility I was broke and registered with Mac Temps as a Photoshop/Illustrator/Quark guy and worked at dozens of companies. By 1999 all my work was on the Web.
I had an assignment to create instruction manuals for 15 electronic home improvement tools in six European languages, and as the project was winding down I told the company's marketing director that their Web site stunk and they should let me revamp it. So they kept me on and I studied HTML at home late into the night and became their Webmaster until 2007.
In the last few years I've also been writing online text for Wal-Mar.com and StubHub.com.
Now I'm suddenly on the beach. There was a line in Heinlein's "Door Into Summer"--the robotics engineer from 1970 is timenapped to the year 2000 (written in 1956)--the engineer is looking through the Help Wanted pages and thinks, "to claim that I was now an engineer would be too much like walking up to du Pont's and saying, "Sirrah, I am an alchymiste. Hast need of art such as mine?""
So here I am, a wordsmith from the depths of the 70s, still able to convert information into easy-to-read tech information.
But nobody knows I'm here.
I've been lethargically living on the Zircon carrion for nine years. Now I'm out of work and running out of money. |
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