Absurdist Micro-Nonfiction
A collection of my favorite work anecdotes
I used to work for a marketing agency as one of the fashion writers and happened to be responsible for all of our activewear clients, meaning I had to write all of the underwear copy. Sometimes this meant sitting in a corner giggling to myself because one brand had described their bras as “uplifting”; often it meant projecting huge images of men’s torsos in boxer briefs on the screens of our glass-walled meeting rooms and letting everyone who passed by wonder what on earth I was doing.
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One client, particularly committed to their macho persona, forbade me from ever using the words “love” or “joy” in their communications.
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I had a client who was interested in gender differences in marketing language, so I ran a test on the best email subject lines to market sweaters for women vs. men. The best women’s subject line was something like “Super soft sweaters you’ll never want to take off.” The best men’s subject line was “SWEATERS.”
To be fair, we once learned from another fashion client that over 80% of their men’s email list was actually just women shopping for men. So hey, husband needs a sweater? SWEATERS. Perfect.
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The agency once threw a big party for that client in our San Francisco office, but since no one ever takes writers anywhere, I didn’t get to go. The client’s whole team proceeded to get stuck in the elevator for 45 minutes on the way to the event.
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Shortly before I moved away from fashion and into financial services (weird pivot, I know), we received a couple months’ worth of revenue data from that client from an email I’d worked on during my first few months with them. In just three months, that single subject line had made the client millions of dollars, enough to pay for their entire contract.
We once got feedback not to call a bank’s app easy to use because “it’s not.”
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Early on in the pandemic era, we ran audits for all of our clients looking for marketing language that was deemed insensitive in light of current events: “breaking news,” “best spring ever,” that sort of thing. One word that a particular technology company had used an astounding amount that was now permanently banned? “Breathtaking.”
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During my first fully remote performance review in 2020, my dog tried to shove the laptop off of my lap. Her feedback was that I work too much.
I had a client for a while whose main point of contact with us was named Eliza. My project manager would only refer to her on Slack using the custom Slack emoji of my dog Eliza.
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I once had to give a presentation to the Vice President of Investing for a major US bank about why their legal counsel should allow them to say in marketing that the point of investing is to make money—even though, theoretically, you could lose it instead.
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The first day my company moved into our new office this year, there was no internet for about six hours. There was, however, a ping pong table.