Suburban Goddess

Our job is pretty tedious. Day in, day out, we have to produce piles of crap with limited creativity. So I’m actually happy to see my designers try to slip one past the proofers every now & then.

Today an ad sold for a headstone & monument company. But if you look closer, inscribed in Old English on the tombstone, you’ll find the name of one of the most irritating salesmen in the company. It’s our little way of saying, “Be as annoying as you like. We’ll still get the better of you in the end.” Or some version of that I am unable to write here.

It reminded me of a time when I inadvertently created a MAJOR mistake at one of my previous jobs, although this mistake was unintentional. The client was a major foodservice provider who needed a catalog cover for their annual trade show. The theme was “Mysteries of Egypt.” (I don’t really know what this had to do with food, but it gave them all a chance to dress up and walk like Egyptians). So I set about to create a hieroglyphic slate with some carved text. I found a really cool glyph font that had small Egyptian characters, and used it as part of the background.

It went to press, 25,000 copies. As it was rolling off the press, both the pressman & the production manager commented on how cool the cover was. I was quite proud of myself, until the production manager squinted for a moment, pulled the cover away, and made the comment, “WTF is that??”

I took the cover from her and looked. There, in all his glory, was an Egyptian king standing at attention. And he was extremely well-endowed. I was mortified; I’d just hit various keys to lay down the glyphs, I didn’t think any of them would be pornographic! The production manager looked at me with suspicion.

“I swear I didn’t know! I didn’t do it on purpose!” I shrieked. At the end of the day, I had created such an uproar within the company that I expected to escorted out by the end of the day. After weighing the options (trash $7,500 worth of work or pray they didn’t notice), we opted for the latter. Luckily, nobody noticed, but after that, the production manager personally proofed everything that came off my desk. To this day, that manager still swears I did it on purpose.

Did I?

This entry was posted on May 15, 2006 at 11:50 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.