Everyone snaps to attention. For the next five minutes I answer questions about the German company. It takes Laura to get to the point. She’s probably the smartest person in the room.
‘When is the pitch? And what do we have to do?’
‘The work starts today,’ I say, and I can hear a few people groan under their breath. Oh fuck. I really, really do hate telling people things they don’t want to hear. ‘Brainstorm at 3 pm. All staff are invited, compulsory for creatives. Now, um…there’ll be weekly meetings with them rather than just the one big pitch. Coop knows the, uh, head guy, and he’s, um pitching us as the kind of agency that works as a partner, not a supplier…’ I look around. Everyone’s still paying me total attention. Gosh.
I clear my throat. ‘The good news is that there’s no one else competing with us for the job—yet. The bad news is that if they’re not happy, we will lose them straightaway. Which means the pressure is going to be pretty consistent over the next few months. Coop wants everyone to help. So there’ll be a lot of late nights and possibly weekend work…’
I hear even louder groaning. Oh shit. Mutiny.
Andy speaks up. Oh double shit. ‘We can’t do that on top of everything else. It’s not possible.’
‘Well, it has to be,’ I say to the wall, as I don’t dare to meet his eyes.
‘I’m already here till eight every night,’ he says. ‘My team and I work harder than anyone else. We need extra support. I know a couple of freelancers. I’ll call them.’
‘No,’ I say, looking at his chin. ‘Everyone in this agency works hard, Andy. If you and your team didn’t spend half the day looking at YouTube, you wouldn’t have to stay late to get the work done.’
I see the account managers smiling at this.
‘It’s creative research,’ he says loudly. ‘We need stimulus. We actually create things, you know…’
God, you’re pathetic, I think.
Suddenly I don’t feel intimidated by him. Right this second, I don’t care if he—or any of them, actually—likes me or not. I am in charge of this pitch, and I am not going to let some charm-challenged man-boy fuck it up for me.
I stand up and look him straight in the eye. ‘Well, for the next month, you and Danny and Ben are going to have to get your creative stimulus outside working hours. This is the most important thing to ever happen to this agency. I don’t want creative to be responsible for losing this account, and I’m sure you don’t either.’
He stares at me without speaking. I stare back. He looks away first. Fucking hell! Yeah!
Danny raises a hand. Gosh, what am I, a teacher? ‘Yes, Danny?’
‘One of the clients at my last agency was Johnson & Johnson. I know the market. I’d like to be involved.’
‘Great.’ Dude, what part of ‘Coop wants everyone to help’ don’t you understand, I think. Then he flickers a little smile at me and I realise he might actually be speaking up to show support to me, and give two fingers to Andy. Double gosh.
Charlotte clears her throat and raises her OPI I’ve Got A Date To K-Night!-manicured hand. ‘I’d really like to be involved too, my team will be able to manage all my existing clients.’ Her ‘team’—two account execs (recent graduates that she works like dogs)—glance at each other in anguish. ‘Is that OK?’
Even Charlotte is treating me like I’m in charge? ‘I’m sure that’s fine. You’ll have to run it past Scott, though.’
She nods. Everyone is looking at me expectantly. What do I say now? Class dismissed? ‘OK, well, see you all the boardroom at 3 pm.’ The office disperses quickly, but the rise in buzzy chatter shows how excited everyone is about this pitch. Shit, it really is a big deal, you know. And Coop asked me to be in charge, kind of.
As I walk back to my desk, Laura beams at me and I wink back. I feel pretty good. In fact, I feel great. I sit down and realise my heart is racing with excitement. I just can’t believe how well that went. I look over. Andy is loudly inviting his team out for coffee. And a Sass-slagging session, I expect. Laura and I are not, obviously, invited.
I’m busy for the next few hours doing work for existing clients, and when Coop comes back and looks over to me with raised eyebrows, I just nod back with a little smile. Everything is fine, dude. Totally fine. The 3 pm brainstorm goes equally well. Apart from Andy loudly denigrating every idea I have, and coming up with none of his own. My brain is 100% dedicated to the task at hand. Men, love, dating—these things are no longer worthy of my time and energy.
As the meeting finishes, I stand up and say ‘Thanks everyone’, mostly to genuinely thank everyone but also as I want Andy to know that he hasn’t beaten me. He ignores me. I grin at Cooper on my way out and he gives me the thumbs up back. I choose to take it as a message of solidarity. Thank God he’s back from Germany. It’s so much nicer sitting in the office without big bad Andy dominating it.
With only a few hours left till the weekend, I settle down to one of my favourite regular jobs: a monthly chatty email to teenage girls about their spots for a skincare client of ours. (When they sign up to the social networking bit of this skincare site, they’ll get an email a week for a few months. It’s mostly skin-related stuff, and some period/hormone/ hygiene/boy talk. And the odd discount and competitions and prize draws.)
Let’s see…Discover the power of perfect skin. Discover the joy of perfect skin. Imagine perfectly soft, deeply clean skin. Finally, perfect skin could be yours. Picture perfect skin, every day. Transform your skin, and your life. Yikes, that’s a bit much. Let’s go with the first one. Discover is a nice strong active word, and alliteration is always a positive pleasure. Plus, it’s not promising perfect skin. You can’t really promise something like ‘Perfect skin, guaranteed’. You have to just talk about how good it could be to get perfect skin. Otherwise—according to the neurotic marketing manager at the skincare company, anyway—someone who uses the stuff and gets a spot could sue. (Really, who would bother?)
The power of positive persuasion. That’s what I’d title today. Coop positively persuaded me to take a bit of a lead role in telling everyone, and I positively persuaded everyone to get behind it.
As I start writing the rest of my peppy teenage copy, I get lost in an odd, reflective mood. Poor teenage girls, I muse. I found it quite tough being a teenager. I was attacked by a shyness bug from 14 through 17, and had a slight stammer/babble problem when I did talk. It’s not exactly unusual: apparently Kate was shy, too. (Bloomie never was, unsurprisingly.)
Some girls must be born knowing how to make life happen exactly as they want it to. I assume they’re not the ones reading these skincare emails, but I’ve seen them on the King’s Road in Chelsea: dewy-skinned, pouty little 16-year-old madams with the air of cream-fed, much-adored cats. I was not one of those girls. When I was 13, my parents moved from London to Berkshire, and I changed from a bookish, liberal little Notting Hill school where everyone was a bit keen and giggly and geeky like me, to a rather posh, uptight, sporty, country one where the lustrous-haired pouty missies ruled the roost. They looked at me, recognised my stammering inadequacies instantly, and dismissed me. And of course, when someone doubts you, the more you doubt yourself, until you’re unable to talk at all, or at least I am.
That’s when I started the mantra. ‘Posture is confidence, silence is poise.’ The idea was that if I looked confident and poised, I’d feel confident and poised. And people might think I was about to say something brilliant. And then, if I did want to say something, they might actually listen, which might stop me stammering.
In other words, fake it till you make it.
Thanks to my mantra, I survived school. Then I went to university,