The Boomer Never Knows When It's Friday

Today is, evidently Friday, but you would never know that if you were in the Boomers head.
He has been working 7 days a week for so long than he no longer keeps track of what day it is. In fact he is almost completely reliant on the Reminders program in his Mac to let him know what he has to do when.
Today, Friday, the boomer assumes, is a cloudy but humid one. Storms have been passing through since early last evening. The level of the pool is up two inches and he considers that he might have to backwash it down, otherwise the filter trap won’t work as well.
He looks at his to do list for today:
• Design some post cards and customize some letters for his Bullet Proof Consulting Partnership marketing program. He met with his partner, the lovely and talented Charlene Norman, yesterday and they worked out all the details.
• Order the new business cards which were designed last week, but he didn’t order because something was bugging him. The logo was a bit too big. So fix that.
• Email some invoices and late payment reminders to one of his clients.
• Do some promotion for beBee.com where he is a Canadian brand ambassador
• Have a Face Time with his buddy Shelley Brown in Chicago.
The Boomer has been friends with Shelley Brown for a while now. He cannot recall exactly how they first hooked up. He thinks it was probably on LinkedIn, when she commented on a post of his. He thought she was really bright and if there is anything the Boomers looks for in his friends, it’s that special light in their eyes that indicates that there is indeed a real human being in there.
Shelley has a series of posts that she writes called the Weird Girl Stories. They are brilliantly written pieces of memoir about her life, and all the things in it.
Shelley lives in Chicago and works for some big company that does something that requires a lot of people to be on the phone booking things and organizing them.
Having become a fan of her writing, and knowing how skillful she is with people, the Boomer thinks she could be in marketing or advertising and do quite well.
In advertising there’s a hell of a lot of stuff to do, but it all revolves around 3 basic principles. 1. A strategy that works. 2. Creative that supports the strategy and is intriguing and informative. 3.The right media.
If you are a good sales person and an organized thinker, the Boomer muses, advertising is a good gig to be in. Usually you have funky offices, bright people to work with, mostly sane clients and very little in the way or political correctness to deal with.
The Boomer knows this to be true because he spent 20 years working in the ad agency business. He got as high up as he cared to go in it and once he had had the 3 Basic Principles as second nature, went out on his own.
The world changed dramatically for the Boomer after he left the agency business in 1989.
The most difficult of those changes involved dealing with the astonishing number of charlatans, con men, prima donnas and just plain idiots that float around the outer fringes, which is where most independent creative people work.
It was a whole different challenge, sorting out who was real and who was not. But the Boomer had no intention of becoming part of the brigade of freelancers who were simply hired to paper the walls of new business presentations for agencies.
No, he wanted real accounts, with clients who had made a conscious decision to live outside the high mark-up, flavour of the month creative world that the agencies, at that time, represented.
It took a while, but he eventually found them, these good, smart, savvy people who needed a solid triple threat in their lives.
And so it went.
But the Boomer digresses.
He has written many posts about his agency life, but only a relative few about what happened after that, that quarter century where the clock and the calendar and probably his Circadian rhythm became nothing more than a single stream that flowed in between periods of sleep.
Where his activities ranged from poetry and lyrics, to blogs to short stories and TV and movie treatments to ads more blogs and memes and web sites and more advertising.
All on the same continuum called his waking life.
They say there is no rest for the wicked, and while the Boomer does not consider himself to be in that esteemed category, there is, evidently, no rest for him either.
He goes from dawn to dusk…from day to day to day…not so much enslaved by his craft, but enraptured by it to be sure.
And so as he posts this post on a Friday. (He looked it up and sure enough there it was), the Boomer wishes you all a great weekend and for those of you in his homeland, add a ‘long’ to that salutation.

This is Boomer Post #5. Other posts in this series can be read at https://www.bebee.com/@jim-murray

Jim Murray is a communication strategist, writer, art director, blogger and beBee brand ambassador for Canada. His partner, Charlene Norman is a business systems and operational analyst. Their collaboration is called Bullet Proof Consulting, headquartered in St Catharines, Ontario and designed to serve forward thinking businesses in the Niagara and Golden Horseshoe regions of Southern Ontario. You can find out more about us at: www.bulletproofconsulting.ca

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