Sipping With the Big Boys

Yesterday, I found myself in the rare position of chatting to an industry colleague.

Suffice to say this was very shocking.

No one ever talks to me about anything these days.

Not even my sister.

So you can imagine how shocked I was when I learned that this person actually shared the same opinion as me.

I couldn’t believe it.

And to make matters worse, this person had reached that opinion entirely by them selves.

It was astonishing.

Seriously. There I was, sipping my coffee, and not two feet away from me was another human being, in broad daylight, and with no obvious mental impairment, brazenly agreeing with me.

Who in the hell did they think they were? Independently validating my deeply unpopular opinions like that. Some kind of amiable freak?

For a moment I felt ill. Sick to my rotten core.

But then something began to dawn on me.

Slowly –ever so slowly - at first, like a stifled yawn. 

And as the penny dropped, so did my jaw.

(Along with the quality of my metaphors).

Here in this ordinary café, on an ordinary morning, we had found a universal truth. A truth so apparent to us, yet so hidden from the wider industry.

“Why?” we asked each other. “Why is it so hard to find decent mid-weight copywriters at the moment?” There simply seemed to be none.

The waitress brought more coffee and we began to talk.

We’d agreed on our problem and now looked to each other for answers.

Opinions became theories, and theories became arguments.

Do junior writers just get bored and want to play elsewhere? 

Has freelance culture killed them off?

Or has the fluidity of disciplines in studios simply rendered them obsolete?

The answer it seemed was not to be found in this blogpost.

By turning a tedious anecdote about coffee into a mock existential noir, I had learned just one thing about copywriting.

It takes a senior to write this kind of shit.