The story of my left testicle
Warning: this story contains a lot of childish humour.
About six years ago I’d just started a new job as a senior copywriter. It was my first week in the agency and I was keen to make my mark. In the interview process they’d seen all my work, and seemed excited to be working with a copywriter with my kind of ideas. Buzzing.
Obviously they wanted more of what I could do - they’d hired me.
I was invited into a briefing session for my first project, a chance (I thought) to flex my creative muscles and show everyone what their new talent was all about.
But as the brief went on, and on, and on, it became clear to me that I wasn’t going to be coming up with any ideas at the end of it. Instead, the creative director told me I was being tasked with doing some competitor research. “What you can do is go and find out what everyone else is up to, while I think of the ideas!” is how I remember it going.
Now, I’m not against some competitor stalking. I can see there’s a point in it, sometimes, but only if you’re then going to come up with some ideas on the back of it. There’s no point in doing it whatsoever if the creative process is happening somewhere else at the same time.
Also (and this was my big gripe): why hire a creative copywriter if you’re not going to let them do any creative copywriting?
I reacted thusly:
“I’d rather you give me something else to do - my left bollock could do that.”
There was silence. I’m not sure the CD even knew my name at that point, and he definitely didn’t expect the word ‘bollock’ to come out of my mouth in his direction. After a few awkward glances, we all left the meeting and went back to our desks. Him to do the work I should have been doing, me to have a look on Google.
Later on that day, my manager pulled me to one side:
“I’ve been told you said something inappropriate in a meeting earlier on, would you care to explain?”
“Yeah, I was asked to do some work my left bollock could do, so I said that.”
At this point HR were called in, which I think still stands as a personal record. I’ve spent a lot of time with various HR departments throughout my career, but never within the first week before. We spent a bit of time chatting about why I couldn’t say such things to the creative director, I made a point to only say such things behind their back in the future, and life carried on as normal. In fact I didn’t think about my left bollock for years after.
Until that very woman from HR got in touch via my website.
She worked somewhere else now, and needed a copywriter to help with a project. She’d remembered me, and knew I’d be the man for the job. I didn’t know it at the time, but that job would go on to be the best paying freelance gig of my career to date.
So there you have it - my left bollock had earned me some top dollar, and put a lot of pressure on my right one to start pulling its weight.
What can you take away from this? Three things, I reckon:
Be memorable.
Do work that stands out, be helpful, be provocative, be funny. Do anything that people will remember and think, “Hey, that person did that thing once, let’s use them again.”Be likeable
If I’d dropped a bollock and been a bit of a prick, it might have gone another way for me. But because I’m generally a solid 7/10 on the personality scale, it worked in my favour. Be nice and you can get away with being a bit cheeky.Back up your bollocks
Finally, almost as if this whole post was written with this ending in mind, back up your bollocks by being good at your job. I find people will be happy to work with creatives who are either nice and average at their job, or people who are a bit of a dick but amazing at their job. They hardly ever want to work with talentless wankers.
Also there’s a decent chance this person just searched ‘copywriter’ on LinkedIn and I came up as a connection, but that wouldn’t have made such a good blog post.