Subject: Technicalities Resent-From: staff.newyork@agency.com Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 09:53:41 -0400 From: "Mitch Golden" To: nystaff@agency.com, woodbridge@agency.com, Zeyad Elmenayer Technicalities August 14, 2000 *) An Elemenary Discourse On Economics I am forever amused at the trouble I get into writing this newsletter. Last time around I passed on an observation of Laurence Hill's - that there were water coolers on 12 in finance but not elsewhere - and made the casual note that it was no longer possible to get any water from the filters in the sinks. There were two results: the filters were immediately changed, and everyone in finance is irritated. (Evidently the water coolers are an explicit choice of the finance group, funded by them. So now I'm worried: I have several thousand dollars of expense checks outstanding, and I wonder when I'll see my money out of a department that's ticked off at me.) Nonetheless, noting that the filters _did_ get changed, I'll weigh in on another issue: our departed ice cream machine. I can understand that someone felt that it was underperforming. I would argue that it was pretty clear why - whoever was in charge failed to pay attention to obvious consumer preferences. As Mike Villane pointed out to me, the Choco-Tacos always sold out about 15 seconds after the machine was loaded. Leads me to believe that they needed to explore what was in the machine, not remove the machine itself. How about _three_ columns of Choco-Tacos, and maybe two of the Premium Sandwich Cookies? And let's dump those cheesy cones, shall we? No one over the age of 10 likes those. So now there's no machine there at all. How can it be that not selling ice cream is more profitable than coming up with _something_ to vend? *) Diets, Again Another side-effect of writing Technicalities is all the information I get sent in response. The mention of Yuju Yen's Atkins Diet in the last issue brought an e-mail informing that some believe that following that plan can lead to kidney stones. Peter Gluck, whose adoption of the Scarsdale diet was also noted herein, told me that his cholesterol shot up to 300, and his doctor urged him to try something else. Not that what I learn has any effect: Peter is undaunted. As you can see, http://intranet.agency.com/MainspanScripts/0/AgencyKR/AgencyKRWomSession/AgencyKRWomSecureSession/A8EINJF8E7A131BA004CFPI99C/gluckcheese.jpg , Peter is still enjoying all-cheese Fridays. (Last week it was 1/2 pound of smoked Gouda, and a nearly equal amount of cheddar.) Peter told me he'd rather be thin and dead. *) An Important Note For Travelers Richard Harris informs me that had I watched a pornographic movie in the hotel in St. Louis, it would not have been expensible to the client. *) These Kids Nowadays On July 4th ABC News ran a bit about teenagers and summer jobs. It turns out that fewer teens are spending their vacations working these days. If ABC News is to be believed, the shortage of appropriate-aged american lifeguards is so dire that local beaches are having to recruit Eastern European gastarbeiters and balding middle aged stockbrokers into the role. Evidently AGENCY.COM is exacerbating the problem. One of the issues, the report noted, is that teens are working at all sorts of dot-coms. The spot featured our own Zeyad Elmenayer as an example of someone shirking his duty to spend the warm months performing society's menial tasks. The snippet of Zeyad featured him listening to Chris Stetson babbling something or other about EJBs and servlets, while drawing random rectangles on a whiteboard. (ABC edited out the part where Chris started to pitch Bluestone.) Then, ABC had the enthusiastic Zeyad telling America how much he was enjoying himself. Do you think that ABC News would have been happier had they shown Chris talking to him about something more tedious, such as writing mailto forms in perl? *) It Was Ugly Well, August is well upon us, and that means that the review season is pretty much over for now. I for one am glad about that, since it was so rough this time around. I only know about some of the reviews, but they were harsh. Here is a sample: **) After a year, Jamil Ellis is still failing to look any older. He told me that he might try growing some facial hair and see how that goes. **) Eugenia Antipas got the sitebuilders group to play with blocks, but there were complaints that she hogged all the good shapes for herself. **) We really had to castigate Deb Ronsvalle. There are still a few people in the office who remember what she looks like. **) Scott Huang was told that now that we've hired Peter, he'd better cut his hair shorter if he's going to compete. **) Laurence Hill had to overcome that British reticence if he was going to get anywhere in this country. (He did pretty well at the town meeting, don't you think?) **) We told James McHugh that he could never be promoted if none of the clients could understand him - he had to lose that accent. Also, we felt that the pieces he was writing for the British magazine Front http://www.activate.co.uk/Microsites/Frontactive/Backissues/default.asp were way too intellectual: http://www.activate.co.uk/Microsites/Frontactive/Mates/default.asp (When James built the site, he didn't code the HTML too well, and it works in IE only.) **) Peter Gluck's review was the ugliest. Heather Mlodinow soundly thrashed him for his limited vision in the creative brief he wrote, and told him that if his MS Project skills didn't improve, there would be hell to pay. (I heard that Henry Sauvageot caught hell from Chris Needham about the structure of some of his Java code, but I didn't get any details.) *) The Usual Well, the tech department had another of our social nights out. This time it was at a Korean restaurant in Herald Square. Of course, Yoo Kyung Chang, our resident expert in all matters Korean, blew us off. That left Yuju - who claimed to have some knowledge of the cuisine - to do the ordering for all of us. This is, as you can imagine, a rather risky proposition given her current dietary proclivities. Nonetheless, the meal arrived without incident, and even contained a few items that I could actually eat. Still, the fare seemed a bit slanted away from all things carbohydrated (I ate Yuju's bowl of rice), and by my measure David Bortichak and Scott Huang, who were sitting near me, wound up eating what seemed to me to be about 1/3 of a pig, and a goodly portion of a cow. Naturally, Ritesh and Chris were _way_ too busy to join us. There were _very_ important matters to attend to that evening, I'm quite sure. (I was the one who got stuck with the bill.) *) We always knew it... Recently Reid Kleinman told me he wasn't getting these issues of Technicalities. I was surprised about that - I send it to the nystaff alias, which everyone in the office should get. Check this out: the nystaff alias contains the aliases for creative, for strategy, for project management, for account management, for accounting and finance... but not tech. Evidently, we're admitted on a case-by-case basis.