I Hate Thursdays

People usually hate Mondays, but since I have never had the "Monday Blues," I never understood the Monday bashing. Some people hate "Wednesdays" because there is nothing particularly special about them, and others hate Sundays because they're so close to Monday. Thursdays seem to be "college party nights", and Fridays are the flat-out "whoohoo, party-time" days and nights...so that really leaves Tuesday to be the "hey, what's up pretty lady" day. Saturday's the "hey, we have shit to do" day, but since it's still the weekend, no one really gives a flip about Saturday.

But I just hate Thursdays.

I hate them. Everything that can go wrong seems to go wrong only on Thursdays. I would vote to get them thrown off the week, but since they're really close to Friday (and Friday is Thursday's best friend and party companion), Friday will back Thursday up in a fight in a second. Since everyone loves Friday, they would all pick his side, and I would be screwed. I'd hate Friday too, but damn it, Friday is such a great day no one can truly hate him. But back to my aversion of Thursdays: I hate Thursdays.

At the agency, every Thursday would mean me having to wake up 45 minutes (to an hour) earlier just so that I could get to work by 8am. Granted, the traditional work day was 8:30am to 5:30 pm, with an imaginary one hour lunch period in between (I say "imaginary" because, unless I was out with a vendor or media partner, I never really took a lunch. Well, I eventually started taking one after I got fed up with the place and decided my health was worth more than the two peanuts and a cracker Charlie would pay me). But at any rate, our official work day was 8:30am to 5:30pm (on the dot!) with an hour lunch. On Thursdays, however, we would be required to come in at 8am, half an hour earlier than usual. You would think, as a person of sound mind, that any compassionate human being would let you leave 30 minutes earlier on the day they've required you to come in half and hour earlier for a mandatory meeting you never agreed to. Oh! But no, my amigo. Why would he allow that! 8-hour days? Cha! Anything less than 12 is humanitarian. He truly believed that these hour-long "training" meetings were for our personal enrichment, and that we should consider ourselves blessed for having the opportunity to spend one hour with the smartest, wittiest man in the world. For all I know, he probably wanted us to start paying him for the "expertise" gained through these "training" meetings.

Ay que no! Que "expertise," ni que "expertise!

Expertise my ass. The only thing Charlie was an expert in was making us fall asleep. By the time I would arrive to these "training" meetings, I would be so tired from having been up so early, that I had to chug black coffee just to stay awake enough to breathe. At that point, I would have injected the coffee straight into my veins if that were given as an option.

Once I got there, all of us peons would be herded into this large conference room, where we would be forced to listen to the president and the vice president talk about how great they were, and how horrible we make them look by comparison. Consistently like clockwork, Charlie would yap about how great his agency was and how we should all be like him; how we should all strive for excellence, and that we should all be lucky enough to have a mentor like him. Wanda, the veneered-toothed female version of the man, would stand up and talk about how well she knew the Hispanic market and how she was the Hispanic market. I didn't mind her at first, but then my Hispanic, ghetto-Latina side slowly came out. I am a Hispanic first, and a marketer second, so slowly after weeks and weeks and weeks of being told what "my people" like to eat, drink, think, believe, or do, by this little petite, Lexus-driving German/Hungarian European, I got a little offended. For so long, my sociological-side managed to control my passionate Latina side by calming her down, but eventually, my crazy passionate Latina side wiggled herself loose from my controlled self, and managed to convince my "professional" side that "a Caucasian lady, without updated Hispanic marketing research, but with a self-satisfying, self-aggrandizing egocentric personality, can't possibly make an educated statement about the Hispanic market."

Not saying that 'white' people don't know anything about the Hispanic market. In fact, some of the most brilliant pieces about Hispanic marketing were written by non-Hispanic individuals. What I am saying, however, is that it is hard to claim to be an expert in the Hispanic field if you don't have any concrete, relevant, up-to-date research to back it up... or if you're not Hispanic. At least if she was Hispanic she would have some sort of reference, her family or herself, but she literally had nothing-no valid marketing research information, no personal experience, nada. That, and if she knew the market so well, she'd know how offended some Hispanics would actually be by her as-a-matter-of-fact statements: I know you, I've been through some of the same shit you have.

First, it's offensive when someone outside your cultural realm tells you "they've been through what you've been through to the tee." Try telling an African American person that you know "how it feels to be black in America," when you're a blue-eyed, blond haired, trust-fund baby, and I bet anything you'll have a 50% chance of getting your ass beat. Or worse, try comparing your 'teenage angst issues' in America to an Irishman's peace struggle in their homeland, or to an Iraqi woman's equality struggle in their homeland, or to a starving family in Africa and their survival struggle in their land, and you'll see that having your cell phone taken away by your parents is not too bad by comparison. Don't start off as a know-it-all. Start off as a learner-someone interested in another culture. People react differently to you if you take a meek approach versus the "I know what your people are like more than you do, and you're doing it all wrong" approach.

These meetings reminded me of the Roadrunner & Wile E. Coyote cartoons, and we were the damn coyote always being tricked into some painful scheme, and her inaccurate "Hispanic truths" was the Roadrunner running circles around our standard logic. Anthropology/Sociology/Human Sciences, etc. were developed in order to understand the human socio-culture as a whole. However, Wanda worked backwards. Instead of sitting down, and looking at this group of people for what they were, she would ignore the facts, and keep alive (in her brain) the idea of what Hispanic people should be like. Seriously, she'd tell us a chicken was an ostrich, but we'd look at the egg, and clearly see it was too small to be an ostrich. The egg would then hatch, and she'd say it was a rare, dwarf mutant version of an ostrich when it was clearly a chicken. She did this all the time. There was no stopping her. For a while there we actually tried doing something about it, but quickly realized all our attempts were futile. So we just sat there, smiled, and quietly passed the hour away.

The best Thursdays were when I'd arrive early enough to not be late to work, but late enough to avoid sitting near the front of the room because all the seats would be taken. I just loved sitting (or standing) in the back of the room, far away from the callous, condemnatory eyes of Charlie and Wanda. I was half asleep anyway, so who really needed all the pressure?

Towards the end of my tenure there, I went into one of these Thursday meetings particularly happy. I arrived early enough to get a seat toward the front of the room, but I didn't care. Maybe I had had enough sleep the night before, or had time to eat breakfast that morning. Either way, I wasn't miserable, and I was wide awake, which was the best I could really hope for at the time. One of the people from PR (Public Relations) gave an excellent presentation about Latina Magazine putting the first dark-skinned Latina on a Hispanic magazine cover. Personally, I loved that! I had actually received the issue, and I thought it was so great that the antiquated world of Hispanic media was actually being progressive for once. Personally, I don't watch Hispanic TV anymore because I can't relate to the people on Univision or some of the other channels. They only seem to show thin, fair-skinned güeras that look nothing like my chunky, ghetto-fabulous Hispanic self. I'm brown. I have dark hair. I like my food like I like my men-spicy, meaty, and in buffet-style. I'm not going to stop eating because someone says I don't fit the mold of the Sexy TV Latina. F that! There are more brown people on general market TV than there are in Univision....so you bet your ass I stick to watching the TV I can relate to-general market TV.

At any rate, I was so impressed by her presentation that day. The PR lady, whom I adore because despite being "white" she's probably the coolest "brown sympathizer" I know, made an excellent point about the Hispanic market embracing all of its ranges and "colors." Hispanics do come in more than one color, and dark Hispanics are often (sadly enough) the most neglected in "our" media. People are so beautiful in all shapes, colors, and forms, so to see magazines, and TV shows, and other mediums within the Hispanic media landscape recognizing this, is just beautiful! All was going well until "it" happened....

(oh yeah. God-forbid the world move an inch without "it" having a say about it)

.... he actually said that that was the stupidest shit he ever heard in his life. He went on and on and on in an argument, all to himself, regarding dark-skinned Hispanics in media: how they have no place in Hispanic media or anywhere; how no one cares about them; how they don't count; how they're a waste of advertising dollars; and how "people want to strive to be like the people in commercials, and no one wants to strive to be a black person."

I was pissed off. It was one thing to sort of act jerky towards the darker Hispanics in the agency, and favor (and promote) the Caucasians, but to flat out say they are not worthy of anyone's view time or advertising dollars because no one would want to strive to be like them? WOW. That took the cake. An OK Thursday turned to shit in less than 30 seconds. At that point the meeting was almost over so a lot of us stood up to leave. I left. I was like "F this, I'm done." And right as a lot of us had left the room, he said, as an aside to someone, "I'll be damned if I let un pinche negro in my commercials."