The all-nighter

Above: in the long still moments of the night I stood in the office kitchen and looked at the jars of instant coffee. Like Winston Smith in 1984 I was able to match two pieces of information. Is Waitrose guilty of “passing off” its own-brand instant coffee as Mellow Birds coffee? (same shape jar, same colours, same use of the word mellow, more or less same image of a cup - all the money and effort Birds has put into brand development is being pilfered by Waitrose).

The big project we have all been working on reached one of its peaks on Tuesday when the “all-nighter” was held. This entailed staying on after work, and working through the night, as information came in, until the job was done and the conclusions could be presented to the client at 11 o’clock on Wednesday morning. Only the upstairs (PR) division was involved - with myself included in Val’s team as copywriter.

These all-nighters are held about once every six months. Participants in the all-nighter are carefully chosen, and are viewed by the rest of the agency in the same light as the Spartans who guarded Thermopylae (a mystique they are careful to cultivate). The “sacrifice” of a night of our lives is seen as an offering to placate our most powerful and lucrative client (or, “don’t forget who ultimately pays ALL our wages” as Terry likes to point out - frequently).

Having just been through my first all-nighter I can report that the night mostly consisted of boredom, with IT personnel occasionally rushing through the floor (do they need to rush so urgently, or is that all part of the show?). At about nine o’clock the first information started to arrive (in stat form) and I began to write it up in a coherent narrative (actually I had planned most of the conclusions in advance and used my creative skill to make the facts fit the story).

Between 11pm and 3am the trickle of information became a rush and everyone was busy (Rachel complaining she couldn’t see the big picture, Douglas trying to calm Rachel down, Val using her senior management skills in making everyone coffee).

At 3.30 the rush had become a trickle again, and I went down to the tiny first aid room (where there is an armchair) and sat in the dark with my eyes closed for half an hour.

By 5am it was all over.

At 9 o’clock everyone else came in to start a new day.

Terry (our MD) took us all to a “slap up” breakfast at a hotel. The stormy morning seemed unreasonably bright. After the breakfast Val and her team went back to the agency to present the night’s findings, while I went home to sleep.