March 2007

I’m a director. I yell “CUT!”, “ACTION!”, “THAT’S A WRAP!” and all the other nonsensical things that my people bark out. It’s a great gig. And I’ve been told I’m quite good at it.

I’ve directed sketchy politicians, pumped-up fitness professionals, corny comedians and kitschy country-western singers … but last week I met my match when I had to direct some fairly well-known drag queens for a charity photo shoot here at PlattForm.

For the record, I’ve never met a drag queen I didn’t like … even RuPaul, who has got to be 7’6”, I swear. And last week’s shoot was no exception to that rule. And, fortunately for all parties involved, my photographer Aaron had never met a drag queen he didn’t like. Well, technically … he had never actually MET a drag queen. So goal achieved, I guess.

Lest, I digress …

Now, if you’re a director, you’ve never really lived until you’ve been forced to yell things like “SPIN!”, “TWIRL”, “STRIKE A POSE!” At one point, there was so much glitter and fringe flying through the studio, I thought poor Aaron would have an asthma attack.

And then I had this epiphany … in the world of career colleges, why, oh why, is there no Drag Queen Institute? Or DQI, for short. I had to laugh because my mind immediately started racing and in .03 seconds I came up with DQI’s slogan … “Making over your career and your face … one student at a time.” Brilliant, huh? They could have branches and affiliates for smaller markets … like, maybe the You Go, Girl Academy. Sheer genius!

Lest I digress again …

So, if a picture tells a thousands words … I’ve included some pictures of last week’s shoot. Kudos to everyone who helped pull off a successful (and sequined) shoot to benefit AIDS Walk 2007. And polite apologies to a certain PlattForm Vice President who may or may not have walked into the men’s room during a rather … shall we say … precarious hairspray moment. And Lord knows I’m not even going to mention the lip gloss “incident.”

How can I think of direct mail at a time like this? It’s the beginning of spring, and you know what that means – NCAA madness. I know I’m supposed to give some facts about direct mail and how it can improve your school’s overall marketing plans, but I’m still trying to get back to a normal heart rate after the Jayhawks of Kansas eked out a victory over the Salukis of Southern Illinois. Hey, a win’s a win no matter how ugly. But I give the Jayhawks credit for grinding out a victory. Just like every sports fan, I have a few opinions after reflecting on this game.

#1 – The defense of the Salukis is incredible. I hope we (the Jayhawks) never face a D like that again.

#2 – The zebras were terrible – for both teams. Hey, what does it mean when the shot-clock hits zero and the ball is still in Julian Wright’s hands? It means it’s a shot-clock violation. Call it once in awhile (We’ll let it slide for this game, though.)

#3 – Our free throw shooting is atrocious.

#4 – UCLA’s free throw shooting is awful, too, and it looks like they will have a home game against us in two days. (Where’s the justice in that?)

#5 – Julian Wright can be great, but he really scares me, especially when his lanky body dribbles up the court. I love you, Julian, but you have guards for a reason, so get ‘em the ball!

#6 – Sasha Kaun, you’re a beast. Throw the ball down, big guy.

#7 – Rod Stewart, I see you have a concert in Kansas City next month. Can my mom get some tickets?

#8 – Brandon Rush, you’re 12 for 15 from the field the last two games. Your mom wants you to be more aggressive and shoot more (and so do the rest of the KU faithful).

#9 – There are WAY too many TV timeouts in basketball, but at least I don’t have to hear Ron Franklin and Fran Fraschilla during the tournament. Seriously, Ron, it’s Sherron Collins, not Sharon Collins.

#10 – Somebody please check Greg Oden’s birth certificate. There’s no way he’s under 45 years old.

So there you have it. KU pulled out an ugly one, but they live to see another day and I’m sure I’ll have some more opinions after the next game. My time is up. Peace out, I’m outta here. Oh, and don’t forget to do more direct mail.

I recently took a much needed period of time off and was out of the office for four days. As great as time off is, it’s the coming back I dread. My apprehension grows for one reason only: checking on all the e-mail I missed. I was fortunate to come back to only 500 e-mails. In the Media department, that’s not too bad. In addition to regular e-mails from employees within PlattForm, we also have all the vendors for each of the clients with which we work.

I started through my e-mails early this morning. Here’s what I found (annotated with my inner monologue):

E-mail #45. Thursday, March 15: NCAA score update. Hey, it looks like Oral Roberts might pull through … It looks like my plan to pick my bracket by flipping a coin is paying off!

E-mail #83. Thursday, March 15: A message from someone in my department letting the team know they’ll be out of the office tomorrow. Must be nice. I could go for a vacation from checking e-mails.

E-mail #125. Thursday, March 15: NCAA score update. Thanks, Oral Roberts. I might as well trash my bracket now. Then again, I guess I did that when I filled it out.

E-mail #150. Thursday, March 15: FW: INFO ON THE FEBRUARY 5, 2008 PRIMARY. Wow, looks like the presidential political window starts in December 2007! As if December wasn’t rough enough already (read one of my earlier blogs, if you want more info on December).

E-mail #179. Friday, March 16: PlattForm’s “Thought for the Day” e-mail. “We find no real satisfaction or happiness in life without obstacles to conquer and goals to achieve.” With a short attention span, my goal was to make it all the way through that sentence without … hey, look! Something shiny!

E-mail #235: Friday, March 16: Reimbursement checks are ready. I’m in charge of buying birthday cards for our department, so I was reimbursed. I’ll probably splurge on more cards for our department. We are a pretty big department, after all.

E-mail #287: Monday, March 19: “this morning.” My boss sent a note to let us know he will be in late. He also doesn’t use capitalization often.

E-mail #321: Monday, March 19: Happy Dance. I don’t know what this is, and I’m not reading it.

E-mail #361: Monday, March 19: Mail. Apparently our mail has been sorted.

E-mail #402: Tuesday, March 20: Car with lights on. I’m just neurotic enough that I need to double-check my car, even though I’m reading this a day later. Just to be safe. Be right back. Turns out my lights weren’t on, but I left my CD case wide open, and anyone walking by can see that I maybe, through no fault of my own, might have accidentally purchased an Evanescence CD a few years ago.

E-mail #448: Tuesday, March 20: Fridge Clean Out. Apparently they cleaned out the fridge yesterday because people had been leaving things in for weeks. I guess that’s why I didn’t get my Hot Pocket for lunch today.

E-mail #495: Tuesday, March 20: St. Platty’s Day results. PlattForm had a contest to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day and kick off the season for the Kansas City Corporate Challenge (which is like a scaled down version of “Battle of the Network Stars.”) Looks like Media destroyed the field in the Dizzy Discus event.

Finally made it through all of my e-mails. It’s about 5:49 in the evening, so I think I can finally get started on everything I need to do for today. I’d better unpack my sleeping bag.

For kicks, I lead a creative writing group at PlattForm called the Dead PlattFormers Society. You probably recognize the play on words from the popular movie of similar title back in the early ۥ90s.

I actually hated the movie when it came out. I had this annoying friend who thought it would be life altering to live his life by the slogan “Carpe diem,” which, of course, translated means, “I’m a loser.” So he went around for about six months telling people about the film and how he loved it.

He did he same thing when Nirvana hit it big in the fall of 1992, which is why those boys are the poster boys of lame and I missed out on the whole alternative music craze, including Soundgarden, who I really wanted to like. He dubbed the Nevermind CD onto cassettes and passed it out in hallways. Come to think of it, that was pretty cool, but it didn’t come from a cool person, which makes it lame and the furthest thing from cool.

So, you’re probably thinking if I lead a creative writing group where we discuss poetry and beauty and things of that nature, I must have really been into D&D and played lots of hacky sack, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I was actually pretty cool.

Every one of our writers in DPFS has an open heart and shares it from time to time. It’s real, too. There are some real outbursts of creativity that completely floor me. It’s an interesting group and we don’t really tout ourselves as the standard company group by putting up posters everywhere and sponsoring bake sales. We sort of keep to ourselves, off the radar, which is why you might say we liken ourselves to the film Dead Poets Society, which my friend completely ruined for me ages ago.

If your company has a creative writing group called the Dead PlattFormers Society, please respond to this post. Otherwise, I think we have a pretty original name and work for a pretty original company.

A random bit of conversation turned into some interesting reflection for me today. One of my co-workers mentioned that he gets up at 5:30 to hit the gym (yeah, I’m impressed too), and I was like, “Yeah, I used to have to be up at 5:30 … a really long time ago, I had to be at work at 5:30!” We started talking about past jobs, and he finally asked, “How did you end up in graphic design?”

I’ve gotten that question before. I’ve been a word processor (not a huge fan of that term – I don’t in any way resemble a large putty-colored pre-computer – but that was the title of the position), a fry cook and a transcriber (in two different jobs: one inputting taxpayer info and another that involved watching local news on stations in Illinois, Iowa and Minnesota and noting what stories were discussed in what segments).

Thanks to a job at a local college, I was able to discover and improve upon my talent in design. (The marketing director there asked me to make some flyers to advertise courses that didn’t get into the catalog – thanks again, Bill.) When I got that chance, I already had the other skills I needed to do a good job: flexibility, experience with deadlines, attention to detail, and the ability to get and stay organized. Oh yeah – I also had plenty of experience with long-day, start-to-finish hard work. Being a fry cook is no cakewalk!

Not only have all of these skills served me well at PlattForm – these are skills that all of my colleagues have as well. If you look closely into our creative chaos, you’ll find an organized team that executes dozens and dozens of revisions daily, takes care of last-minute requests, and loves special projects. And I believe our varied backgrounds are a huge strength.

So, I didn’t take the most direct route to graphic design. Does anyone take the direct route anywhere anymore? Besides, you can learn something no matter what path you take if you keep your eyes open … even if the path seems accidental at the time.