Thursday, June 14, 2007

My Week Thus Far

This has been an exhausting week. It started off brutal and got worse from there.

As most of you regulars know, I purchase the airtime to get commercials on television. That's a really simplistic way of describing what I do. Obviously it is far more complex than that and I won't go into all the details here, but I will share some of them.

Typically we buy a 3-month quarter in advance. Because the campaign I'm working on is constantly in a state of flux, we've been buying one month at a time. This gets problematic because we are outside the norm. Everyone else is buying the whole quarter while we have been on a month-to-month routine. I have finally bucked that trend and pre-buy what I think I'm going to need in order to avoid a "shortage of inventory" in July and August, but only in television markets where it has been a challenge to get the inventory I need on short notice.

By inventory, I mean securing the number of 1-minute openings for an ad so that they are reserved in my name for my use.

Although there are currently 4 of us handling this account, two of us are handling about 70% of the money (budget) and the other two are just lazy part-time buyers. Actually one of the other two is my boss and she shouldn't be involved in this at all, in any way, shape or form.

I guess that's why HER boss has decided to hire five junior buyers to take up the slack. We had training this week which took up several hours of my time on Wednesday and Thursday of this week. What is odd is that the software we are using to accomplish this task is rather complex and no one had any questions whatsoever during the training. That's a warning sign.

Oh, and did I mention that three of the five junior buyers are in the Chicago office?

Today I received an email with the "buddy assignments" the five junior buyers have been assigned to us "veterans" for support -- and now I have TWO buddies. This means I'll be answering all their questions once they get into it, and basically training them.

Keep in mind that communication has been and continues to be an issue within our department here in my burg. Now that three of our five junior buyers are in Chicago, the other two juniors are in my building, and two of the other buyers (the part-timer and my boss) are in New York, things are about to get real interesting.

Aside from my head feeling like it's about to explode, I'm laughing on the inside.

Meanwhile a rep showed up at the office today from Chicago. A rep is someone who sells the airtime on behalf of the station. He came in for the day, hung out, and expected to have an entourage go out drinking with him this evening, and when I say drinking, I really mean drinking. Drinks on fire kind of shit. I just can't do it. Not with them applying some kind of lacquer-stripping substance on the concrete floors today that caused me to have flu-like symptoms all afternoon. I just wanted to come home and drink in private, with no fire involved. Jesus.

I don't know where I'm going with this. I just started typing because I wanted to blog about SOMETHING.

Let's change the subject. I'm going to be hungry soon and we're going to make a casserole called "chilaquiles." Occasional visitor and definite blog pal "SAP" can relate.

Basically, it's a lasagna-esque casserole with a tomato sauce base filled with stuff like salsa, veggies, fake meat and then layered between tortilla chips, sour cream and cheese. And we'll have chopped avocado on the side with balsamic vinegar.

As a special treat, we are going to throw in some leftover tortilla from a lunch we had last weekend at a Mexican restaurant here in Austin. With certain dishes they provide you with fresh tortillas, and those are rarely needed to give you a satisfying meal, so txrad usually brings his home where they wait in the refrigerator in hopes of being utilized in a future meal. Tonight, they will be.

Ladies and gents, and anyone in between, I present you with red corn tortillas, which shall soon be incorporated into our dinner this evening:



Now I must go assist in the preparation. Tommorrow is Friday. Rejoice.

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