A NEWSPAPER STORY PART 2 OF 3

PART 1

It turns out that there were also some crazy people in display. One of them was named Winnie who was in her fifties but looked older and didn’t say much. She had absolutely no tact and the only time she said anything to me was when she asked me if I had a cigarette in her low growling voice. Apparently, her boyfriend was a crackhead who always fell off the wagon when he got it together. Winnie got evicted from her apartment and was staying in a motel that did not allow people to have pets. She kept her cat in the Save an Ad office temporarily. Once, the cat ran away from her and she was frantically looking everywhere for it around the office. Seamus, being the veritable smartass that he is, made an announcement on the intercom that “Winnie has lost her pussy.” Before I could finish laughing he made the announcement again just in case no one heard the announcement the first time. Its funny, but before this incident I had never really paid any attention to Seamus. He was the only person, besides Warren and Adam, that made decent money from in the Save an Ad, owing to his position as general manager. Although he is 34, he resembles a frat boy who recently completed university and who thinks that he is a bit cooler than he is. The cat stayed in the Save an Ad for a week and it designated the rug around the copy machine as its litter box.

Adam and Warren took a special interest in Winnie that went beyond the call of duty. Even though they were universally derided by everyone around the office as being tight with their money, I think that Adam and Warren helped pay for her temporary accommodations. According to someone, Winnie was Adam and Warren’s get out of hell card. On Winnie’s desk was a picture of her holding an “employee of the month” award next to Warren and Adam. I asked a few other people if they had known about any such award and they had not.

The writings on the wall suggested that Radk’s 2 year reign as boss in the promotions had run its course. This had nothing to do with his behavior but rather the fact that only myself and Graham showed up with any regularity, which meant that the room was not making the money it should. Eventually, Graham was told by Seamus that he was being moved to classifieds. However, Seamus insisted that Graham get a new outfit since his current one, which consisted exclusively of a green Gap sweatshirt and a pair of jeans with big holes below his ass, wouldn’t pass muster outside of the promotions room. Seamus asked me if I wanted to be moved to display and I said sure because it would free me from working inside an ashtray.

Graham actually purchased a new outfit of khaki pants and a buttoned down jean t-shirt but apparently Seamus was jerking him around and he was never even moved to classifieds. I was moved to display but only after prodding Seamus. The promotions room was still open for business.

My new desk contained a computer that had been completely taken over by viruses. When I innocently tried to check my e-mail it would always re-direct me to pornographic search engines. I figured that I would get some training but that was not to be. I observed someone for 30 minutes on a Friday and that was the extent of it. I was given absolutely no direction and was told to look up numbers in the yellow pages and just randomly phone up businesses. As I’d find out, business owners treated phone solicitation as a crime surpassed only by shoplifting and embezzlement.

There was a person in display that provided leads, consisting of ads found on the internet, named Buckley. I had noticed previously as the shady guy that always bummed cigarettes from Alicia. Buckley had two monitors hooked up to his computer. Supposedly, Adam and Warren could access anyone’s monitor through the computer network in order to see what they were doing Buckley’s solution to this intrusion on his time was to link another monitor to his computer that could not be accessed by Adam or Warren.

After a futile effort thumbing through the yellow pages, I asked Buckley for some leads. He provided me several pages, most of them consisting of massage parlors located in Barrie, north of Toronto. Invariably, the vast majority of the workers that I talked to were either Russian or Chinese and they were paranoid. Whenever I asked for the person that handles “advertising” i.e. their pimp, they were always miraculously on vacation. And they say pimping aint easy! They always thought I was an FBI agent or something whose goal was to shut down their place of employment and deport them.

One of my funniest phone calls was to a “French” lady that provided personal massages. She answered the phone in the loveliest French accent that would put Amelie to shame, but when I asked her if I could speak to the person that handles advertising she instantaneously switched to a decidedly unsexy husky Canadian accent and said “this is not a business”. When I told her that I was from the Save an Ad she did not become combative, probably because she felt sorry for me, but instead calmly stated that she was not interested. She never did revert back to her French accent. That’s her loss because I just might have signed up for a session with her otherwise.

I have to give Seamus the genius award for moving me to display in November even though most businesses set their advertising budgets after the New Year. I was beginning to mislead businesses unintentionally as my desperation increased. I started calling travel agents and telling them that we had a very extensive travel section. When one expressed surprise, I decided to check out our travel section and it consisted of three little ads that even Sherlock Holmes would have trouble finding.

At the end of my first week in display, Radk was informed that he would be demoted to classifieds. After about 18 months, Adam and Warren finally got a clue that just maybe Radk wasn’t a good fit for the job. During his last day as boss, Radk celebrated by smoking crack and he openly downed a Vex (alcoholic beverage) in front of everyone. Even though I sound very negative about Radk I feel sorry for him. If I had tears to spare I could cry for him as sadly he resembles a dead man walking. It is highly probable that he will meet his maker by way of a drug related death and if he wants to reach fifty he better start praying hard.

So what was the fate of the promotions room? Well Buckley actually persuaded Adam and Warren that he should become the new boss of promotions. Buckley was in his early thirties and married with one kid. He looked a bit younger than his years and must have been the shady kid with the backwards baseball cap that sold pot in the middle school bathroom. In the early 90s, Buckley was part of a band called XXXX that signed a major record deal with Sire Records and produced one album called XXXX . One of their music videos even got played on MTV once. He said that the “Madchester” scene from Manchester, England had a large influence on their sound and, judging by the name of the band and album, LSD apparently did as well.

Buckley totally revamped the room and put up a multitude of posters that were not necessarily the most appropriate decorations, given the fact that the occasional odd client came in to place an ad. They included a poster of Kurt Cobain, aliens, and various movies. Right in front of one of the desks was a poster of the LSD guru Timothy Leary, superimposed on a purple psychedelic background, exhorting us to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” Buckley did ban smoking in the room because otherwise he would be smoking “a million cigarettes” or more accurately bumming them.

Buckley was going to provide leads and he devised a new pitch that reflected his loose interpretation of ethics. As Alicia said numerous times, Buckley is a con artist and he admitted so as much with a shrug. For $55, we told the customers that we would run their ads for eight weeks and it would continue on until their car/item was sold. Unless they elaborated, we tried to finesse the fact that after 8 weeks their paid ad would in fact morph into a free classified ad that was not categorized in any particular order, rendering it difficult for consumers to find it. Also, if consumers were reticent about giving their credit card numbers over the phone he told us to tell them that they would not have to pay G.S.T. while in fact no one has to pay G.S.T. for advertising.

Warren and Adam gave Buckley full autonomy in terms of recruiting new workers, which he found off a music discussion board called 20Hz. His hook about the Save an Ad was that “it’s a cross between (the movies) Glengarry Glen Ross, Office Space, and Gummo.” Many people replied back to him, including one person who was concerned that he wouldn’t be hired because he lacked sales experience but had worked at hotels and had done “like 3,000 hours of volunteering.” Buckley was able to attract three people named Dan, who became Stu, Ben, and some disaffected Joy Division like kid. Timothy Leary’s words apparently had an impact on the Joy Division kid because all he did was stare out into the blank space. To no one’s surprise, he quit within a week.

If there was one thing that Buckley did with consistency it was smoking pot. Everyone in the office knew, except Buckley because he probably forgot, and he rolled joints at his computer as if he was in Bob Marley’s house. He did have the courtesy to smoke his joints outside. On Buckley’s first day as boss, Adam asked him why his eyes were shut and Buckley replied that he was tired. Adam told him to use Visine the next time he got tired and said that he reeked of weed.

It was comedic that out of all the people in the office, and in Toronto for that matter, Adam and Warren picked Buckley to run his own office and granted him full control. If the Save an Ad was located in by some alleyway in the suburbs that would be one thing but they let Buckley control his own office in the middle of downtown Toronto which is supposedly Canada’s economic engine.

The next round of hires from 20Hz were a couple of friends that had recently moved to Toronto from Abbotsford, BC named Jason and Jenna. They were in their early twenties and were more on the alternative side. Jason looked like a slacker who managed to keep up appearances while Jenna was one of those annoying vegan types who wants everyone to be one too. I was tempted to buy her a mink coat.

Apparently, typing ads became too much work for Buckley because it interfered with his duties of surfing the internet and getting high. He, without consulting Adam, designated Jason as his “secretary” and as Dan said, Jason morphed into Buckley II. Between typing up the occasional ad, Jason would explore the wonders of MSN. It was a treat watching Buckley slumped in his chair behind his two monitors while listening to Happy Mondays tunes, predating their seminal album Pills, Thrills, and Bellyaches, that I thought only I had listened too. Oh, Sean Ryder would be so proud! Like clockwork, Alicia would tell Buckley to turn the music down and he always came up with the same comeback which was “turn down your hearing aid.” I’d always envision Buckley going back to his high school and telling his teachers, who probably told him that he’d be a burnout with no money, that he does absolutely nothing at work but get stoned and surf the net and yet still gets paid.

Kavitha, who is a 19 year old girl attending Centenniel College, came in to work at the Save an Ad. She apparently had worked there previously and was known as a star seller. I asked her how she got introduced to the Save an Ad and she told me her story. She used to work at a telemarketing place downstairs, which was replaced by the worst Middle Eastern restaurant you’ll ever find. She got fired from that job after she was overheard by her boss on the phone telling an old lady that it was not necessary for her to get her credit card since she said she would have to turn on her heart monitor in order to walk across the room to get it. Kavitha is very nice and she had this personable quality on the phone that seemingly made callers forget everything and give her their credit card number.
If someone wants to place an ad with us they have the option of sending us a photo of their car which we will place on our website. I got a call from a client that complained he had repeatedly checked our website and could not locate a picture of his car. I told Buckley, and he told me that putting pictures up on the website is too hard because, apparently, that meant he’d actually have to do something. I noticed that the guy listed a website in his ad called www.skylinegtrs.com which featured various cars for sale such as Nissan Skyline GTRS, of course, and Mercedes. I went to take a look at it and it was the most amazing thing I ever saw. Each little tab made a different car sound effect when you moved the cursor over it and it was filled with flash animation. I was like, how do I explain to this guy that we can’t put a fuckin picture on the website because its too “hard”? Besides, our website, looked like one that was put together by a bunch of grandmas to promote a high school bake sale for the school library so he probably regretted in the first place that he placed an ad with us. In order to deflect himself from having to handle complaints, Buckley designated Jenna as the customer service lady even though at times she appeared as diplomatic as Saddam Hussein.

- d.f.

PART 3