Corporate Improvements

I am a font of corporate strength. When deadlines come rushing headlong toward me, with their horns blaring, their lights flashing, and steam pouring from their stacks like a runaway locomotive hauling razor blades and lemon juice, I just laugh. When stalwart co-workers become crushed beneath a burden of overwork and merit demotions that leave them whimpering in the production room, I chuckle.

I eat multi-project, multi-deliverable timelines like Ritz Crackers with a squirt of E-Z-Cheeze, turn to my boss and say, “Please ma’am, may I have ten more?”

I am a marketing machine.

Because of this, I hold others up to the high bar of prestige and exacting quality that I use to govern my own career. And yet, there are times when even I feel the slightest quiver of a major artery as it threatens to collapse under the strain of stress and seismic activity that is my job.

To that end, I have decided there are certain survival, emergency and stress-relieving elements that every corporate marketing team should install to insure the continued viability (i.e. feeding themselves) of middle management marketers across the country:

1 – Fully-armed and Operational Bar – This isn’t just something you do immediately following work on a weekday. This is the time between frustration and pathological insanity that could easily save mental lives.

2 – Tranquilizer guns – Nothing less than a rhino-level dosage. This is effective both on yourself, and on those pesky clients who believe you have a magic bat-a-rang that can turn back time, speed up the harvest or teleport their project directly into a customer’s hands.

3 – Cloning – forget life-saving organ replacement, or struck-by-a-car-and-brain-transferred-spouses, the ability to function in multiple places at the same times has previously required an act of time paradox that is extremely taxing on the soul and the manicure.

4 – Sales Staff Mute Button – A must for any fully-equipped and mentally-functional marketing team, this little button is a life-saver. When a sales team member with poor planning and preparation skills comes streaking into your cubicle demanding that their problem become your problem, you simply hit the candy-red button, sit back, and every now and then say softly, “I’m sorry, I can’t hear you.”

I’m pleased that my own company has spared no expense when it comes to these, and many other task-necessary devices. Rather than pushing back on the time-machine-required deadlines, or the my-emergency-is-your-tragedy, they understand human nature and have provided for every possible outcome.

Three cheers!