The Office: Part Six (He Who Must not Be Named)

I checked my own blog today to see if it was magically updated. It wasn't. So, I put in the work to provide you, dear readers, with this:

I wanted this to be my very first post about my former office, but I have to confess that fear kept me from posting it. Fear of having the pants sued off of me. The man that I am about to write about has the ability to do that, and I'm just not interested in loosing large sums of cash or my house over a blog post. I have changed the names, cities, and some of the colors in this story to protect myself from that fate.

The station hired another one of those consultant folks on a regular basis. This one is particularly offensive. He's from a large city in Texas, and it makes me sad that several of my former coworkers only had him and me as a connection to the Lone Star State.

His name was Oddie (not really) and he was a short man with slicked back nasty reddish grayish hair that was definitely a fire hazard. He reeked of cologne and aftershave, and gave me the general feeling that his alternate profession could have easily been child molester. His business scam made him a rich man, so he wore a lot of wealth around his neck in the form of gold chains (plus, gold rings, bracelets, earrings, and tie pins). He wore expensive, but still ugly clothing and spoke with a Texas accent plus a lisp. I guess money can't buy you clear speech. He had a different wife every year. I guess money can get you divorced and remarried several times.

His deal was that he would come to the station once a year. We would gather up some poor unsuspecting clients (or else risk losing our jobs) and they would meet with him in a very high pressure situation. He would claim to have written some of the biggest marketing slogans of all time, and then write them a jingle for a gigantic commitment of money to the station. In return, the station would pay him a gigantic amount of money (like 25% of total commitments) before he left town and more importantly (and stupidly) before we collected a penny from any clients.

If you live in the area, you have undoubtedly heard some of the crap that he has written. Stuff that sounds like a 2nd grader came up with the lyrics. I can't say any of them here, for fear that he'll find this and sue that pants off of me. They are bad. I promise, really bad.

The thing is -- Oddie didn't really write those big fast food and beer company jingles that he claimed to. He does however, own the rights to them. He buys those rights after people stop using them, and passes them off as his own work. They are impressive and when you tell someone that you wrote all of those things for McD's, Bud, or whoever, they want you to write theirs too. You end up with a good for nothing slogan about "what life was meant to be" that is being used by 10 other home builders in 12 other states. Nothing original. No advertising gold. Nothing but tens of thousands of dollars committed to a station and a crappy jingle. That's it.

The sad part was that this guy ruined more relationships with clients than I can count. He also treated all of us like crap.

Oh, oh ... also, he would offer to produce your commercial for 10% of the cost of your commitment to the station. In most cases, that meant that you were paying about $10K for a spot. On one such occasion my client declined. Instead, he had a local firm produce his spot using stock footage. It cost him about $1500. Then, the spots that Oddie's company produced came back. Guess what? He used the same stock footage on another client's spot!!!! I mean, the same shots and everything!!! And, he charged $10,000 for a commercial that he didn't even shoot.

Well, I felt like it was my responsibility to point out his antics and publicly embarrass him. So, I did at a sales meeting the next time he came to town. What did he do? Deny, deny, deny. He said that they were "similar, but not the same." Are you kidding me? They were similar in the same way that two yellow m&ms look the same.

What a freaking scam artist. And, what stupid management for bringing him back year after year.

More Oddie stories to come.