Hay Naku!

For the first time I got irritated with my officemate. She is assigned to another format. But unfortunately my client has this irritating way of calling her up instead of me whenever my client is in panic mode. And today my client was panicking over a print ad.

Yes, I admit that I had my share to blame. I started working on the print ad quite late. But for my officemate to just swoop in and take over things just because in her judgment the print ad doesn’t work, is arrogant. When she saw it, it was still a work in progress. But she declared, “It doesn’t work!” even before the artist could finish.

Yes, she has won more creative awards than I have. Yes, her revised print ad looks good. But she never gave my original idea a chance.

But what really gets my goat is the fact that she didn’t like what she saw, pulled the project off from under my feet and proceeded to revise it while blurting out loud for everyone to hear, “Oh my god, this is so unfair! We’re conceptualizing last-minute! How can we do that with the deadline so near?! I’m getting a headache! I don’t need this stress!”

When she stepped out of the room the other artists went up to me and said, “She’s the one making her own problems! She’s the one creating her own stress. If she had allowed your original idea to be finished, we would have met the deadline.”

At the end of the day I don’t care if her final layout is award-winning or not. I’d rather make my own mistakes and learn from them. And she chose to take on the additional work of revising the print ad to her standards so she should stop complaining.

What an arrogant bitch.

(In the end several changes she made, both in execution and in direction, were rejected by the client. I knew that she was stepping out of bounds but I just kept quiet and let my client do the dirty work. When she found out about it she declared out loud, “Really! Your client has no creative judgment whatsoever!”)

Now I'm wondering: am I also being arrogant when I insist that I make my own mistakes?