Pay Day (eBook)

Ron Elgin (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
528 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3509-4834-9 (ISBN)

'The Pay Day' will have you roaring laughing out loud. If you're looking for wit like Vonnegut's, quirkiness like a Woody Allen movie, and office shenanigans that would Michael Scott blush, then this is the book for you.

Ron Elgin's fourth book, 'The Pay Day,' offers a humorous glimpse into his forty-year career in the advertising industry. Elgin shares his journey of success, failures, and experiences from being expelled in high school to co-founding a successful agency with major clients like Microsoft and McDonald's. His philosophy of avoiding working with 'assholes,' hiring talented individuals, and believing in hard work led to his expansive, entrepreneurial success. Ron and his extremely beautiful, bright, and patient wife of fifty-five years Bonni lived in Seattle most of their lives. As their bones got older, they moved to Newport Beach to be closer to the world's most wonderful daughter, Alison; their equally wonderful son-in-law, Brett; and their absolutely perfect grandchildren, Logan, Hutton, and Ripley.

"e;The Pay Day"e; is the zany sequel to Ron Elgin's best-seller "e;Hucksterville"e; featuring Megan Santucci, the once beautiful, brilliant advertising whiz kid who became addicted to booze and drugs and ended up homeless under a bridge. After kicking her addictions, she became the star creative director of Tight Fit Athletics. After her boss is eaten in his Seattle office by a crocodile, his sister Lotta shows up from an animal farm in Africa to take charge. Megan hates Lotta as much as she hated Max, but she leads her motley team to unparalleled success regardless. Lotta was a multibillionaire used to getting her way, and that doesn't sit well with Megan. Many familiar characters reappear, including Carmen, a physiologist; Meat, a former cage fighter; The Herman, genius creative team with the same name and terrible personal hygiene; and Possibly Peter who still suffers from a bad case of Tourette's. Scene after scene of this novel is filled with witty dialogue and absurd situations. The Herman fled for their lives from the Tight Fit campus after pooping in Lotta's camp/site office and went to London, England to participate in the International Crepitation Contest. For you less-sophisticated readers, that's a farting contest. Wait until you read the results!

PROLOGUE

“Did I ever tell you about the old biddy who kicked me out of the downtown public library?” Megan asked. She and Helen were sipping steaming lattes in the Starbucks on Sixth Avenue across from Nordstrom’s flagship store in Seattle.

“I don’t think so,” Helen replied.

“It was a typical rainy, chilly Seattle winter day back when I was living in a cardboard box under the I-5 freeway. I used to visit the library primarily to use the restroom to clean up as best I could, but also to relax with a good book in a warm, quiet place. I’d found a book by a local guy about how he and his partner started their own advertising agency from scratch and grew it to the market’s largest. Their story was really inspirational.”

“And the biddy?”

“Sorry. I admit that back then, I was always dirty and smelly, but I wasn’t bothering anyone. It was way before social distancing, but around me, people were always distancing. Anyway, I was reveling in a particular episode of the book when this old biddy came up to me and told me to wake up and get out.”

“She accused you of sleeping?” Helen asked.

“She said I was sleeping and it wasn’t allowed. I said I wasn’t sleeping; I was imagining the joy of someday getting back on my feet and owning my own agency. She really got in my face, albeit from ten feet away, and told me very loudly to put down the book, get out, and never return. She humiliated me even more by spraying air freshener at me all the way out the door.”

“She sounds like a heartless asshole. That’s the story?”

“No, Helen, that was the heartbreaking beginning of a story that has recently had a much more satisfying ending.”

Megan Marie Santucci began life as the precocious only child of Gino and Maria Santucci in a Seattle suburb named Lake Forrest Park at the north end of Lake Washington. Her dad was a skilled carpenter, and her mom was an administrator at Shorecrest High School. They lived in a very nice but modest 1930s Georgian Tudor at the end of Perkins Lane overlooking the lake.

Megan was their firstborn. But then again, Megan was always first. First in her class academically. First in swimming and track. First in her judo and karate classes. And always first to test trouble.

But by her junior year at the University of Washington, Megan’s first-place finishes began to wane. The reason? She had discovered the joys of boys and beer. Although her grades were slipping, she could still balance boys, beers, and academics while remaining near the top of her class at the School of Communications. At least she thought of it as balance.

Megan was stunning—brilliant, beautiful, and charming. Her athletic figure had rounded out in the right places by her senior year, and by graduation, she stood five-foot-seven with long blond hair, blue eyes with green highlights, and a sparkling, out-going personality. She was an absolute knockout.

Megan’s first job out of college was as a junior copywriter at a small Seattle advertising agency. There she met and fell in love with her art director partner. He was talented, handsome, and a stoner. He taught her the joy of combining beer with weed. More balance. But he moved on.

Her next love affair was with an associate creative director. With his guidance, she moved up to hard liquor and drugs. In those early days, her work was superb, but her attitude and attendance were becoming less than sterling. Then her career began to unravel. The quality of her work was still well above average but no longer the best in its class. She also earned a well-deserved reputation for unreliability. That era ended when a weekend with a guy in Vancouver turned into an unexcused week and a half off. She was fired. So was he. That ended their relationship.

For the next three years, Megan worked at agencies in Portland, San Francisco, and Denver. The story was the same at every agency in every new city. For the first time in her life, Megan was no longer a winner. She had become a loser.

One morning, in a second-rate motel in a Denver suburb, Megan’s cell phone cut through her boozy fog. A long-time neighbor told her that her parents had been killed in an automobile accident.

Megan’s once charmed life ended back in Seattle—alone with the loss of her parents, self-esteem, and a career she had once loved. On top of it all, she discovered her parents had been deeply in debt and passed away without a cent of insurance.

Deeply depressed, Megan thanked her high school friend for letting her crash at her place in the West Seattle area for a few days. Then she gathered the few things she still valued in a backpack and headed out on foot to find a convent or monastery. She planned to live out her days celibate and, hopefully, clean and sober. She got as far as the I-5 Freeway when she ran into a torrential rainstorm. She took shelter under the freeway in a vacant cardboard box. It became her home for the next two years.

Life was beyond miserable, but her dreadful, humbling situation was the stimulation Megan needed to rediscover a missing element of her personality—courage.

Courage had gotten her walking at an early age. Courage had made her the first in preschool to recite the alphabet in front of the class. Courage had always led her to a lifetime of being first. That same courage helped her survive the degradation of nearly two years of homelessness and finally enter a Twelve-Step program and get clean and sober. Finding meetings with other homeless people, whom she felt would be less judgmental than regular addicts, was easier than she’d feared, and she embraced the regimen. Her sponsor lived two boxes over, which was good, because Megan had no phone.

Then one day, a local employee recruitment firm was given an impossible deadline to find and hire a dozen people with advertising agency experience. Using some very creative headhunting strategies and tactics and with the promise of triple fees, the firm met the challenge. It was pure and simple luck, however, that two of the recruiters stumbled upon Megan in that homeless camp on a hunch that perhaps some of the spray-painting graffiti artists were burned-out former advertising people. Remarkably, they actually found several. After some initial harsh words between the recruiters and this particular transient, a compassionate female recruiter offered to help the now sober Megan clean up, stake her to some new clothes, and give her a much-needed makeover. Within a few miraculous days, Megan had a job in the newly formed advertising department of Seattle-based Tight Fit Athletics, a worldwide athletics wear company.

Those fortunate happenstances were all Megan needed to reignite the creative fire in her belly and soul. In remarkably short order, she earned the position of creative director of Tight Fit Athletics’ brand-new, in-house advertising agency. That’s where she met her now best friend, Helen Wait, Tight Fit’s COO/CFO.

“Tell me about the more satisfying ending,” Helen said.

“You remember Stuart Pedd; he was recruited along with me to Tight Fit. He once built a fair-sized agency only to have it ultimately fall into bankruptcy. I told you back then that I thought I could learn a lot about building a successful agency from his mistakes. Once in a while, he’d lay a gem on me. For example, he told me one of the best ways to get connected with a business community’s muckety-mucks was to get involved in some of their favorite, high-profile non-profit organizations.

“I called Stu over at Tight Fit a couple of weeks ago to ask if he knew of any non-profits in Seattle that were currently in search of an agency partner. He did and, of all things, it was a rebranding assignment for the downtown branch of the Seattle Public Library. Stu heard about it from a friend of a friend. The library had issued a request for proposal about six months earlier, but to date, it had been unable to find a firm to accept the pro bono assignment. The Friends of the Library organization had offered a million-dollar grant to cover the production costs for the creation of an entirely new image. One of the grant’s stipulations was the work had to begin within six months of design approval and be completed within twelve. The problem was the library had been unable for five-and-a-half months to find a single agency interested in working with them. Time was running out.”

“Why couldn’t they find an agency to work with them?” Helen asked.

“I didn’t question that at the time. I was content to believe the agency that provided an approved solution would be viewed as a hero in the eyes of the Seattle Public Library, the Friends of the Library organization, and the business community in general.”

“Sounds like a perfect entrée to some possible paying customers. Do you want a warmup on your coffee?”

“No, thanks. Let me finish; his friend briefed me on the assignment. I developed the strategy and Possibly Peter,...

Erscheint lt. Verlag	6.6.2024
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Comic / Humor / Manga
ISBN-13	979-8-3509-4834-9 / 9798350948349

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