How comfortable things would have been had we won

Monday - I got to my desk feeling fairly relaxed since I knew I did not have a great deal to do. In many ways I felt I had deserved an easy day after the excessive work of recent weeks. I sat back in my chair, with a cup of tea, and congratulated myself on having a job where I could do nothing (within reason) if I wanted to.

We were due to hear this morning whether we had got the business following the Warwickshire presentation a couple of weeks back. There was a great deal of anticipation. Pete (my assistant) took a particular interest (“Will you be taking on extra people?”).

At eleven o’clock Ian (our boss) asked Kate and myself into the Conference Room and said that we had lost the presentation due to the creative element. Ian looked very shaken. Kate was aghast at the news (“I’d have put money on us getting it”).

Gradually the news seeped out to the rest of the staff. Failing to get the client leaves us all slightly vulnerable (and silently asking: what will the Directors in the senior division upstairs think of it?). The worst aspect is that we lost to arch-rivals Henry Webb Advertising (where Kate used to work, and from whom she stole a number of clients when she moved to us).

In the afternoon things began to get busy for me. In this job there is so much chasing to be done. You can never rely on people to do things on time.

Towards the end of the day freelance designer Joey came in to be briefed (by me) on a technical drawing. He was just back from holiday and was very tanned, although I am not sure how much of the pigment was genuine. While I was talking to him he blushed a deep red under his dark brown skin - it was an odd sight (a sort of purple). His eyes looked over my shoulder. As I turned round to follow his gaze I was just in time to see Kate smiling at him before walking off smartly. And I thought: what is going on there?

Tuesday - how different the situation has become, now we know we are not getting the Warwickshire work. How comfortable things would have been had we won, how smug and complacent we could have become. Instead we are forced to face the reality that not enough money is coming in (plenty of money is being made, but it simply isn’t “enough”).

Lunchtime, and another staff meeting in the Conference Room. We had to sit around the table for about ten minutes waiting for it to begin, a sotto voce grumbling going on among Sheila’s admin team. The “lads” (Paul, Pete, plus Iain and Ben from the photographic studio) came in early from their football practice out in the compound and stood all sweaty while boss Ian made another of his rambling speeches. Ben looked bored. Pete fidgeted. Instead of the usual pizza slices and tepid wine we had catered sandwiches, pastries and cream cakes - and it occurred to me that this lunch had been booked to celebrate winning the Warwickshire account (as we had lost presumably the champagne had been held back).

Wednesday - a paucity of work, almost as alarming as the vast amount of work I had struggled with last week. Most of the day I spent visiting a northern client (the meeting only look an hour, the rest of the time was driving). As I arrived and got out of Kate’s car (borrowed for the day) I dropped all my papers and in the wind they scattered around the car park. All this was watched from an upstairs window by the client and his sales team. For some reason they thought it was hilarious, and it put them in a tremendously good mood, so that in the meeting everything went through on the nod. This was very good news as the campaign proposals were quite ambitious and I had been afraid they would want to scale it back.

Thursday - another sluggish day. In the morning Kate, Ian, Alan and myself held a new business meeting to try to get things back on course. Terry, the Managing Director upstairs (and our ultimate boss) came in to give us his advice (“You need to double your failure rate” he told Kate, “instead of doing two presentations a month, do four”).

Later a small disaster for Sheila and her admin team. A company magazine we do for a client (everything from writing and designing it to stuffing the envelopes and posting it off) was returned by the post office for having insufficient postage. This puzzled Sheila as they had been weighed and franked correctly. Eventually she discovered that Iain (photographic studio) had left the franked mail in his van outside his house overnight before taking it to the post office. In the damp weather the magazines had absorbed moisture and this had taken them over the weight limit. Because of the postal strike the mailing had only just been returned to us (it was meant to have gone out a month ago - we had even billed the client).

Friday - student designer Stuart left today after a couple of weeks work-experience in our studio. He seemed very sad at leaving, although most people were completely indifferent to his going. At half-past four Tony and Paul in the studio gave him a card and some vouchers. He then came over to where Alan and I were talking (Ian was out) and shook hands. Then he shouted a general goodbye to the office, to which no-one responded. And then he left.

His going made Alan very philosophical.

“When you first arrive at a London ad agency you are led to believe the world is your oyster” Alan said.

“And then you discover oysters are actually cold, unpleasant and slimy” I said.