If I worked for an ad agency, I can come in at eleven in the morning and work until three, that’s how those creative people work. I need to work with people who are just like me. Ad agency work would be a snap.
A co-worker once gave her a book on how to break into the advertising field. Shirley read the first three pages of the book as she sat in a bar waiting for a friend. The first couple of pages stated how one needs perseverance to break into advertising because it is such a competitive field. She underlined the words “perseverance” and “competitive”. In fact she underlined those two words twice since they made such an impression on her. But after a night of heavy drinking, she lost the book in one of the many bars she and her friend went to that night. Weeks later, many nights after drinking alone in her living room, she regretted that she lost the book.
A damn shame, it seemed like a good book to me, she often thought. But it never occurred to Shirley that she could get another copy at a bookstore or from a library.
Shirley’s second idea was to work at some trendy dance club, those cavernous nightclubs that were once warehouses. She loved the feel of those clubs. The loud music, the fog machines, and the heavy industrial music. She loved being around the club people. She loved the way they dressed and loved their stamina for partying. But Shirley had gone only once in her life to one of those clubs. Every night when she came home from work she thought of going out to a couple of those clubs to seek employment. She wasn’t sure what kind of work she would do there. Maybe she could bartend, be a hostess or a waitperson, she wasn’t sure. All she knew was that working in a club would sure beat working in a law firm. But each night when she came home from work, she would drop herself on her couch and start to drink and chain smoke and never made the effort to seek employment in one of those clubs.