Now turns into ASAP, ASAP gives way to stat and pretty soon the Account Manager is claiming he needs it by yesterday.

Jesus, where has the day gone?

Regardless of what you’ve heard about agency days being filled with stochastic periods of foosball, Wii Tennis and the mandatory three trips a day to the coffee shop. Actual work does get done, and agencies can be busy places. It may be slow today but tomorrow is sure to be jam packed. After all, isn’t that when everything is needed and has to be done by?

Often when ad people require things by tomorrow, they’ll follow up their request with a nice little maxim – meant to inspire and spawn productivity. A staple go-to would be the old adage, “time is money”. Of course this is usually uttered by someone in the agency who makes too much money and tries their hardest to appear like they don’t have enough time. But logic and rationale tell us that this is all rubbish anyways. Time is clearly more valuable than money. You can always get more money, but you can never get more time. And you’ll always need more time when thing needs to be done by tomorrow.  Oddly enough though, it always seems the one person with more time, is the person telling you they need it by tomorrow.

These people tend to deliver their message about the changed deadline moments before 5:00 pm, knowing you’ll have to stay late that night to get the work done. They’ll sometimes offer their assistance – if you see them before they duck out for the night – and even if they do stick around the “help”, most of that time will be spent BBM’ing someone, bitching about having to stay late. But take comfort in the fact that since you’re staying late, you’ll get a free pizza out of the whole deal, while the Account Manager meets up with some clients for a round of drinks and a nice dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steak House.

“See ya tomorrow. And why don’t you come in at 8:30am instead of 8:00am…you’ve earned it big guy.”