Special Edition: Tall Tales.

I wrote this ages ago, before Off Kilter was even a glimmer in my eye. I had no idea what to do with it then, so it just sat on my hard drive gathering dust. Anyway, I recently found it, and it made me chuckle to reread it, so I figured, why not update it a little and share it with you all? My apologies for such a self-indulgent nostalgia fest. Regular service shall resume Thursday.

PS. The links are silly rather than educational.

Hemorrhoid Toothpaste & Other Tall Tales.

Work in any truly creative environment for a decent enough length of time, and you’ll walk away armed with enough stories to last a lifetime.

For me, this was the period from 2000-2011 when I worked at Wolff Olins, where wild and wildly inflated stories were the cultural currency, told and re-told with an ever-increasing array of embellishments and narrative flourishes to the point where fact and fiction became impossible to separate.

The first Wolff Olins story I experienced for myself was at the 2001: A Space Odyssey-themed holiday party I attended two days after joining. At 3 am, the ECD lit up the dancefloor, busting his moves and waving his trousers around his head…no underwear on. Nobody even batted an eyelid, busy as they were having red wine shot into their mouths from 10 feet away by two German consultants with Super-Soakers. Which doesn’t sound all that wild until I tell you the room; floors, walls, ceilings, and all was Space Odyssey white. The place looked like an abattoir by the time they were done.

Then there was the tale I was told of a death-defying high-speed trip down the French Autoroute with an elderly Wally Olins driving his Porsche to its limits (British car, so steering wheel on the wrong side to make it even more fear-inducing) while screaming instructions for an upcoming pitch at his passenger and colleague, Nigel, because Wally had left his hearing aid at home. Then during the pitch in Paris, he screamed at the client that they were asking questions so stupid that only an idiot would answer them…before instructing Nigel to answer.

Or the consultant asked to cut his holiday short to fly in and pitch a Swiss bank, who duly turned up in a Brioni suit that he then expensed. Reasoning, not totally unreasonably, that nobody would’ve wanted him turning up in his flip-flops and a Hawaiian shirt. However, spending $8,000 on a suit might reasonably be considered unreasonable.

Or, one of my personal favorites: the time a new business guy took it upon himself to fly to Tokyo from New York to present work he’d had nothing to do with creating, proceeded to get wildly, belligerently, drunk, deeply offend a major Japanese partner - causing a months-long ruckus at the holding company level - before accidentally brushing his teeth with hemorrhoid cream…and didn’t get fired.

Who knows how true these are? They’re just a tiny sampling of the stories told, most of which I cannot re-tell in good company. But the story I’m about to share is true and without embellishment. It happened within the first few years of my being there, and you could not make it up.

We’d prepped the pitch. It was for one of the world’s foremost sports-apparel brands that now found itself a bit down on its luck. We were partnering with McKinsey because some big business strategy questions needed answering in addition to the brand component.

We were ready—the combined team had assembled in New York, and the narrative was down. Super simplified, it went like this: Nike is about winning. Adidas is about performance. You should be about sex.

Now, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I’m pretty confident this is the only time McKinsey has ever been in a room pitching an American corporate client on the merits of quantitatively analyzing the relative value of sex as a brand positioning. But that’s exactly what they were about to do. First, though, we had to fly to Boston.

Now, had I known then what I know now, I would’ve known that, unlike New York, there’s nothing at all sexy about Boston. But I didn’t, so I had the complete confidence of a naive 20-something-year-old…

…until we got to the airport and hailed The Worst Cab in America.

Now, the cab itself was innocent enough. The problem was a driver with a single mode of driving—foot to the floor on either the gas pedal or brake. A steady speed achieved only by rapidly lurching from one to the other. You know this cab driver. You’ve driven with him too.

Picture the scene. It’s February in Boston. The snow is lying thick on the ground, and it’s about 10 degrees Fahrenheit. I’m in the front seat; in the back, a Wolff Olins creative director sits in the middle, flanked by our short-tempered Scottish Chairman on one side (Picture Logan Roy from Succession, and you won’t be far off, and yes, the link is to him cursing) with a Supersuit McKinsey partner on the other. The creative director’s laptop is open, and they’re working on last-minute tweaks to the deck.

All I can hear from the front is shouting along the following lines “More f’ing Tate! (a big Wolff Olins case study at the time) “More quantitative data!” “More Tate!” “More quantitative data!” and so on, until the creative director interrupts the flow about 20 minutes in. “Stop the cab…I’m going to throw up.”

And throw up, he did. Spectacularly. Multiple times. Luckily at the side of the road and not in the cab.

He then proceeded to wave us on. “I’m going to walk,” he said.

Now, walking wasn’t exactly an option. It was bitterly cold; we were miles from the client offices, there was no sidewalk, and his winter ensemble, while incredibly stylish, was far from appropriate for the weather. But he was committed to not getting back into The Worst Cab in America, flanked by two contrasting type-A personalities who’d both be screaming at him.

So wave us on, he did. At which point I heard the fateful words I’d been dreading, in that Logan Roy of a voice: “Paul, get your f’ing arse back here. We need somebody to finish this f’ing deck.” Clearly, neither McKinsey partners nor Wolff Olin’s chairmen had any clue how to use PowerPoint. So I was up.

So, now I’m in the back feeling like I’ll throw up at any minute. Our creative director, who has already thrown up, is briskly walking up the road waving his arms and doing meditation exercises to stop himself from throwing up again while beginning to suffer the effects of hypothermia and, quite possibly, frostbite. Our cab driver is crawling alongside him, doing very swift taps on the gas, then brakes, then gas again while a long line of cars builds up, all leaning on their horns and aggressively attempting illegal overtaking maneuvers (Hey, they don’t call Massachusetts drivers Massholes for nothing). All the while, I’m being barked at from both sides, “More f’ing Tate!” “More quantitative data!” and so on.

Eventually, everyone got into the cab, and we somehow made it to the client offices without further incident, where we were greeted by one of the most impressive lobbies I’d ever seen. A cavernous space flanked by a wall of flatscreens running their latest ad campaign on one side, a merchandise store swankier than anything you’d see on 5th Avenue on the other, and a full-sized basketball court way off in the distance ahead. It was impressive, but I barely had time to notice as I was on a mission.

Our last-minute changes to the pitch deck meant a new leave-behind had to be created, the Mac was at 3% battery, and we were back in the dark ages when you had to burn a CD rather than use a thumb drive. So I had to find power. And I had to find it now.

I searched that huge lobby every which way until, eventually, I spotted it—a power strip hidden behind the wall of screens. I hurried over, randomly pulled the first plug I saw, jammed in my laptop power supply…and the entire wall of screens died just as the client team came out to greet us. Somehow, that one plug I’d pulled was responsible for them all. I was mortified. Oh shit.

What to do? Well, I did the only thing I could think of: smile politely and shake hands hello while nudging the laptop out of sight with my foot and guiltily mumbling, “Looks like you might need an electrician,” gesturing at the now blank wall of screens.

Long story short, we didn’t win the pitch.

What struck me the most about it was a client introducing himself as “Q, Wharton MBA.” I was so taken aback that I almost responded, “Paul, Gucci suit,” because I happened to be wearing one at the time. I remember thinking it odd that he then spent the entire pitch engrossed in his BlackBerry, not looking at us or our presentation once. He certainly didn’t ask any questions. In hindsight, it was a telling sign.

As I mentioned, we didn’t win the pitch. But it wasn’t for the reasons you might think. Most of the room liked the pitch, sex, and all. Despite all the taxi trauma, we did a great job presenting, and a distinct faction favored both the suggested approach and our combined team. But our friend Q, Wharton MBA, had a different agenda. He had another agency waiting in the wings; we were just there to warm his colleagues up to the idea that this work was needed. Worse? The leader of that agency was the person who introduced us to the opportunity in the first place. So it was all a big fat waste of time orchestrated by a pair of what I might politely refer to as…the ethically challenged.

I have no idea what happened to Q, Wharton MBA. I never saw nor heard of him again. But a few years later, that agency leader? I met him for the first and only time in a different context. A client wanted us to interview him and get his opinion on something, so I was duly dispatched across SoHo to his swanky offices. He personally greeted me and my colleague upon arrival. We were then taken by his assistant to a rather delightful roof deck where we drank tea and waited, and waited, and waited, and waited…Eventually, asking the assistant, who’d stayed with us the whole time, if he’d be coming soon. Only to be told that he wouldn’t be coming soon; in fact, he wouldn’t be coming at all. But we could interview her if we liked. So, not knowing what else to do, we did. And then we left.

Of all the douchebags I’ve ever met in a business that attracts them like flies, he’s the one I remember most vividly.

But, sometimes, stuff catches up with you. A couple of years later, he did some abysmally arrogant work that ended up being value-destroying and very publically embarrassing for a major client. So bad, in fact, that his agency became toxic and collapsed because of it. But not before he was fired and sued by his holding company owners. Karma, of a sort, I guess.

And while I’d rather have won that pitch, at least I got a good story out of it.