MY STUPIDEST THING

Our recent intern Anouk Allen-Mills asked me what the biggest "work mistake" I ever made was. I told her and it made her laugh. But it also reassured her a bit that she hasn't - and my guess would be is never likely to - made such an idiotic error. I thought I'd share it here. I would love to say "to reassure lots of other people starting their careers", but "because I like attention and I think it will get me some" is equally true.

Anyway. It's 2004. I'm 24. I'm on my first and only creative placement at Proximity London with Robbie Greatrex as my partner. We have been given a brief for Whiskas cat food (cc: Mars Petcare... I still kinda blame you guys for this).

I have a vague and, in retrospect, pretty obvious idea about doing recipes for cat owners to cook for their cats. I head to google and type something like, "cooking for cats". One of the top results has a URL that catches my eye. It's HowToCookACat.com (no longer live, for reasons that will become painfully obvious). I click on it and my screen is instantly dominated by a low quality, MS Paint stylee animation of a fork stabbing into a cartoon cat, as the headline "How to cook a cat" animates into place.

It was funny. I still smile thinking about it. So funny, that my needy ego immediately boots up Microsoft Outlook and I type an email. An email to EVERY SINGLE CREATIVE at Proximity London AND the account team. I don't stop and think about this because I am too busy being incredibly droll (and imagining a load of more senior people congratulating me on my drollness). I enthusiastically recommend the site to anyone working on the brief as a source of "inspiration".

Did I think before hitting send? No way! Don't wanna delay all that kudos, do we??

I sit back. I bask in the warm feeling of smug. I minimise Outlook and HowToCookACat.com reappears. I casually scroll down a bit, for the first time, as I await the plaudits...

...and my world ends. The beyond-my-wildest-dreams job and potential career I have somehow landed in after fucking up uni is over. My lifelong friendship with Robbie is over. All the advertising people who were about to nickname me Captain Droll will now forever ghost me. Because, underneath the funny fork-and-cat animation, there is step-by-step, ACTUAL PHOTOGRAPHY OF HOW TO SKIN AND COOK A DOMESTIC CAT.

The photos are awful. Graphic. Clearly real. My palms are sweating just remembering this right now. At the time I was clammy all over, including the top of my head. The level of panic was just off the charts.

What you should do at this point is stop and think. What you should NOT do at this point is immediately follow your email (which most of your busy colleagues will have ignored because you are a placement kid with very little to add to intelligent conversations about ads), with another email. Because, even though the second email is full of genuine remorse and makes it very, very clear that if you love cats and/or human decency, one should not click the previously shared link… of course, sending such an email will only ensure that your previously totally ambivalent colleagues are now 100%, deffo, cast iron guaranteed to look at the filth you just sent. 

I might have cried at this point. Robbie was a mix of gutted and enraged.

The good news is it got worse from here. 

The replies start arriving. A couple of one-worders. “Disgusting”, “No”. A really terse one from someone who I suspect was eating their lunch, along the lines of “Please refrain from sending this sort of material around the office”.

And then the one from Reuben Turner, which I will never forget. 

(Aside: in 2004, banner ads are hardcoded into websites. They do not change when you refresh the page. The banner is part of the page.)

Reuben's Reply-All says, and I remember this word for word, “I think the banner ad at the top of the page might have given you a clue as to the - ahem - quality of this website”.

Sweaty hands scramble on mouse to go back to Internet Explorer, ASAP. HowToCookACat.com is still open. The banner ad is above the funny fork and cat animation. ABOVE. And it’s a massive leaderboard thing across most of the width of the page. And it is dominated by unmissable, flashing, neon, block capital letters. It says, “XXX HARDCORE FUCKFEST”. And, just to top it off, as the taste of puke starts to sting the back of my mouth, I realise that it’s emblazoned along the - ahem - length of a grainy GIF of a sizeable erect penis.

I can not leave our little office. Ever. I have to stay in here and wait until everybody else in the agency has died (presumably as a direct result of a lethal overdose of schadenfreude).

What. The. Actual. FUUUUUCCCCKKKKKKK??? I am trying to imagine how the phone call to my Dad will go, while desperately trying not to imagine how the phone call to my Dad will go. 

Then the ECD replies. He’s not done a Reply-All. Just a note to me and Robbie. This goes down as well as you might expect. Meeting in his office in one hour. 

One hundred and fifty-eight kajillion years later, we run the gauntlet of the creative floor and skulk into Warren Moore’s office. He makes it very clear that Proximity London is not the kind of institution where we share pics of mutilated pets and massive dicks. My head is just permanently nodding itself now. I think I managed to explain it was nothing to do with Robbie. And I garbled an explanation about the not-scrolling-down-before-I-sent-the-link thing. Warren, it has to be said, does not really care for this explanation and reminds me that I am supposed to be proving my worth as a copywriter and not trying to be funny with time-wasting emails.

But he also cannot stifle the occasional smirk. And, as the meeting progresses, it becomes clear we’re not getting kicked out of the agency. I dare to dream. I consider a wisecrack about being lucky the brief wasn’t for baby food, but even I recognise that this might be too soon. 

So I lived to write another day.

And things worked out OK. Well, until we got the brief for the Carling pitch…