Last week I wrote on the topic of self propelling motivation, being your own boss, and staying tough in the game of independent contractors. So I think today I’m going to bitch about some of the silly things encountered in such lucid environment. I say lucid because the longer you are running your own game, the more difficult it becomes to escape into a reality of comfortable delusions. Chances are, if you do manage to unclench the tight fist reality has grasping your throat, it wont be for long. Whether it’s by way of: dreaming, a tryst in an elevator, a wet dream about a tryst in an elevator, daily coffee highs, annual MDMA highs, thigh highs under construction boots or construction boots on the dance floor every Friday night at a salsa club in Harlem – it will end momentarily, spitting you out face planted onto the grimy floors of responsibility.
Fortunately, my escape comes in waves of simplicity; petting a cat, hand washing my back seam cuban heel stockings, checking the stats on my four websites, posting new listings on Yelp about my websites.
Unfortunately, from the same activities which allow such immersive escape emerges a frustration far beyond the reaches of meditation.
After posting a listing on Yelp.com, concentrating ever so hard on flushing out my bio, the bio of the company, finding a way to lump everything I do under the usual title of False Aristocracy I hit UPDATE and it was done. I may as well have been skipping down the street glowing with the accomplishment of a most simple task. Not a week passed before I received a phone call from a high pitched voice by the name of Jessie Park. She seemed to be calling with concerns about my posting. I have had plenty of conversations with website and blog editors who I had not paid nor had planned to pay for collaboration, sponsorship, or information; I figured this was another one of those times. Within minutes we were deep into conversation punctuated by her perpetual and endless questions regarding my businesses, what I was aiming for, and how Yelp can help. Her high, flat tone made it impossible to differentiate between excitement, annoyance, positive reinforcement, or forcefulness. I begun to feel very coddled and confident in my descriptions, more so the third time she asked me to describe my positioning statement than the first. After the fourth round of the maternal inquisition, she apologized and said she had to run to a meeting or two, and that it was definitely, absolutely, necessary that we schedule the rest of the conversation for the following week.
When on that scheduled day she called half an hour late, I begun to take her a little less seriously, and when she emailed me to reschedule yet again, I became downright suspicious.
“What was she after anyway? Wouldn’t she have mentioned a particular advertising program with Yelp if she was trying to sell me her soul? Of course she would. Usually media kits come in neat little zip files with pdfs and charts, not annoying high pitched voices on a cold call,” I thought, replying to her email cordially. We had set a new phone date.
Having saved her phone number in my contacts, I was ready for her this third time; I answered in a matching shrillness of pitch. She jumped right into the questions again, now occasionally alluding to advertising. It must have been her lack of full knowledge on the topic which had started and perpetuated this confusion. Advertising is a noun which means: 1. the act or practice of calling public attention to one’s product, service, need, etc., especially by paid announcements in newspapers and magazines, over radio or television, on billboards, etc.: to get more customers by advertising. 2. paid announcements; advertisements. 3. the profession of planning, designing, and writing advertisements.
Having just watched Art&Copy I was clearly seeing from the perspective of an ad agency, posting advertising in the form of a free listing on Yelp.com. The longer she circled like a vulture over our conversation, spiraling downward towards the carcass of my company, the longer I felt like pray. On her 10th circle around the same four questions I started demanding answers from her. After admitting to being in the sales, and seemingly calling from her home with noisy children screaming in the background, not only did she refuse to give me any solid statistics, demographics or projections, but also refused to quote in the present or send in the future any comprehensive form of media kit stating dollar amont exchanged for increased traffic. Her only excuse was that the numbers are always changing and that I had not told her mine, when in fact I had quoted multiple rates for a variety of projects. I became angry, raising my voice to a volume just under yelling, after which she shrieked, “then why did I call you in the first place, you could have told me you weren’t interested long ago!” Oh, what familiar sentiments fragmented my reality just then, spinning me into a mental vortex of anger, resentment and bloodthirsty rage. I hung up the phone. “you should have asked,” I thought, “ignorant bitch.”
♡ Today’s column was written at Little Skips – office to some, second home to many. ♡
Curious Wednesday is a weekly column written and driven by the personality of Ms. Marquise discussing the insides of her head in relation to things around her. New topics can be found on the Bushwick Daily every Wednesday, while you can find her productions listed on False Aristocracy.