Pendejada Y Media

Rochelle is a #$@*$ idiot.

I don't know what's worse, Charlie hiring any little stupid thing off the street just to fill a seat in his agency, or a silly recent graduate taking a job she clearly doesn't have the minimum skill set to do just because that's all she knows how to do. Maybe she's a sadist and takes pleasure in torture. Who the hell knows. All I know is that Rochelle and Charlie were meant for each other because they're both two flippin' idiots. Dumbasses.

When I say the girl's an idiot, I mean, "the girl is an idiot." She can't order a limo, she needs help arranging lunch for clients, and she doesn't even know what an ISCI (Industry Standard Commercial Identifier) code is, and she's in freakin' advertising. That's like an elephant trainer not knowing what an "elephant trunk" is, or a race car driver not knowing what helmet looks like. Es pendeja. Period.

How hard is it to order a limo, or bring water into a conference room for clients anyway? Even those menial tasks she managed to mess up. She needed help with everything, and I do mean EVERYTHING since setting up meetings and conference rooms were a spectacle, and keeping organized near impossible. What the hell did she do for a year and a half? Sit around and fart all day?

I just feel sorry for the admin staff. She's the type of girl that probably needed help wiping her own ass...and who was there, literally cleaning after her shit? The admin staff. What's worse is that she didn't even know how stupid she was, or how her actions (or inactions) affected other people. She'd wait until deadline to let us media folks know the client wanted to see another flowchart revision (instead of giving us a few days or weeks), and she'd bark orders at the creatives asking them for an hour turn-around on items that would typically take other agencies 2 or 3 weeks to complete. Oh, but Sam loved her! She'd suck up to all the right people, so competence and skill sets were never an issue for her, since both Sam and Charlie loved it when their egos were stroked. Plus, Rochelle saw the agency the same way Charlie and Sam looked at the rest of the agency: as commodities.

So with that said, that brings me to that faithful day: Media Day. Rochelle called me up on the phone, and told me that one of her clients was throwing a "Media Day." I didn't get too excited by the news since that specific client of hers was typically cheap, and Rochelle was unusually horrible at coordinating events. Combine the two factors, cheapness and horribly uncoordinated, and you get the advertising industry's equivalent of piss snowcones on a summer's day. Yeah. You have a nice, cold snowcone in your hand on a hot summer's day, but who really wants to eat a piss snowcone, summer day or not?

She wanted to invite her client's major media partners, and since we were the ones that owned the relationships, she wanted the media department to contact these media vendors and invite them to a soccer game, specifically to honor their relationship. Sam, Rochelle, and a few other account service people would go to this game, but the actual media department, the people that actually knew the media vendors and had relationships with these people, were not invited (if you think about it, that concept is pretty funny since we wanted to make them feel special and like we cared about them, and yet, the people that actually knew their names and histories, the media department, would not be there. Hil-arious).

It was in Rochelle's great moment of genius that she proposed that it would be best if we invite 12 media vendors, but only provide them with one soccer game ticket each (since we only had 12 tickets). She said that giving them one ticket each would enable us to invite more people. I tried to explain to her that offering one ticket (versus 2 or more per media vendor) would make us seem cheap, but she didn't want to hear anything about it. Hell, what do we know about media, right? It's not like the media vendors have access to kick ass concerts and baseball games and soccer games, right? It's not like media vendors have ever given the media department 6 or more tickets for a media event right? Oh wait....THEY HAVE. Aren't these the same people that co-op advertise with all the major venues in Chicago? Oh, that's right. They are. They do have stake, and sometimes partial ownership, of major venues and stadiums. We would not look cheap AT ALL if we invited 12 people, and told them we could only give them one ticket each for the soccer game. Why would they need to bring anyone they know? Knowing people at events is overrated. It wouldn't be awkward AT ALL to show up at an event, and not know anyone there. And why would the media department need to be there anyway? The media department talks to the media vendors all the time, so why would the media department need to be present at Media Day, right? It makes no sense at all that the media department be present at Media Day.

(note: sarcasm)

Anyhoo, I asked Rochelle if she was sure that they had twelve tickets available. She said "yes," and I asked again (even via email). She said," yes. What? You think I'm stupid?" (of course I did, but I was respectful enough to not say anything about that at the time). I asked her again, and made sure to mention that clients have a crazy way of changing their minds, so if she wanted us to only ask a few merchants now, and ask the rest later, "just in case," that it was fine by me.

"Invite the 12," she said, as if it were an order to us.

I told one of our interns (named Joanne) to send the invitations, and literally 5 minutes after Joanne had sent out the last email invitation, Rochelle came back to us and told us that now we only had three tickets available. If it was up to me, I would have only invited one or two merchants at first, and let them invite as many people as they wanted (if in reality, 12 tickets had been available). Not all media outlets are the same, and others simply don't give a rat's ass whether they get invited to media days or not, so why bother inviting those individuals? However, Rochelle and her barking tone demanded that we start inviting all 12 people at once, so we obeyed, and then, not surprisingly, the client took back 9 tickets.

I went up to Sam's office, closed the door, and proceeded to yell at him. "She's a fucking pendeja, Sam." I told him. "She's stupid, and we suggested going about the media day a different way, but she wanted to do it her way, and now we'll look like cheap idiots to the media vendors. What's worse is that we won't be able to attend our own media day, so that completely discredits us in front of our vendors. They know we're account services' bitch, and that the whole media department is a joke, and that can't possibly help with negotiations."

We had to do what we could. We had to uninvited some people...had to convince others that the media day was cancelled...we did what we could to minimize the damage. At the end of the day though, Rochelle was able to secure some more tickets from the client, so more than just three media vendors went to this so-called "Media Day."

Media Day occurred on a Wednesday, and on that same Thursday, after the Thursday "training" meeting, Monica came up to me. She told me that she got a text message from one of the vendors that went to media day --- and he was pist! He was from one of the radio stations we always did business with, and he said that it was the worst event he ever attended. It turned out that all these media vendor tickets were far apart from each other. In fact, he said that he was the only one in his section, and that it was so embarrassing that he was all alone in his section, being rained on, and not having anyone to talk to. What made matters worse was that he accidentally walked into the McDonald's skybox minutes before (because he knew someone in there), and they had even invited him to stay there. "No, no, I have to go," he told his friends, " a client invited me for Media Day today."

Que media day, ni que media day. The guy was stuck all alone in his section, in the rain, unable to invite any colleagues or dates; he had wanted to take his little girl to the game, but he couldn't because we didn't have another ticket for him. To add insult to injury, all the tickets Rochelle had given them were spread out throughout the whole stadium, so all of the media vendors sat alone, in the rain and without dates, without any other media vendors or colleagues in sight. How embarrassing. You would have thought that she would have atleast placed them all in the same section. Oh no. Not Rochelle.

Pendeja.

Dumbass.

So when Monica, the bitchy vice president, told me that he had left her very angry texts and voicemails, I was both embarrassed and mortified. Once again, I stormed into Sam's office and gave him a piece of his mind, but he really didn't see what the problem was. A few hours later, an indignant Rochelle comes into my office demanding to know why my media people didn't show up to her Media Day. Not one.

I told her, "Funny, I know of at least one that went, since he texted Monica, and told her what a shitty time he was having in the rain all by himself." She didn't understand what I was talking about, but I told her I would follow-up with my media vendors to see if it was true that most of them didn't go.

We follow-up with them, and only two said they had cancelled, but the rest had gone. In fact, Rochelle had even met a few of them (I found out days later).

At the end of the day she walked in my office indignant again only this time with Sam, demanding my follow-up. I told her how most of the vendors had gone to the Media Day. "Funny," she said in a sarcastic and annoyed voice, "because we don't have records of any of them going." Then I said, "That is funny. Because that's how disorganized this whole Media Day was that you couldn't even keep track of the people that were there."

With her smug look permanently manifested upon her face, I grabbed my phone and said, "Here Sam & Rochelle. Why don't you call _______ and ask him about the angry text he left Monica regarding our lack of professionalism. I dare you to tell him that he was never there...and that Media Day never happened for him."