Malkidian Geometry

I left my prior career, making movie trailers, several years ago. I worked in that industry full-time from 2002-2008, then switched to part-time before finally retiring for good in 2009.

I spent much of that time at three different ad agencies, but also worked gigs at several other places. Other people moved around too, and since it’s a small industry, paths cross a lot. It’s common to slide from agency to agency, or even from the agency side to the movie studio side, and back again as your resumé gets more impressive and your salary requirements rise. 

Naturally, I made friends in that business, a few of whom I stay in touch with, and Facebook lets me know what they’re up to. It’s weird to see the small pool of people in this very rarefied business mix up and recombine. An editor I used to work with at Agency Y now works for Agency X, the place I had left to go to Y. A producer I worked with at Agency Z left to start his own Agency A, and a producer I knew separately at Y now works for him. Editors 1, 2, and 3 all left Agency Y independently and wound up at Agency B, working with someone I knew from Agency Z. Etc, etc.

I have no stake in that world at all anymore besides still having affection for some of the people I knew, so I find myself thinking “Ooh, it’s COOL that Person 1 now works with Person 2, because I liked them independently! Maybe they will discover somehow that they both know me?” It’s a strange reminder that life moves on, that the train of all those people’s lives continued to roll despite the fact that I got off at an earlier station.

And I’m now far enough removed that certain people have made two, three, four career moves since I knew them. Person 1 left Agency X for Agency A, then got poached to work for Agency B, then got poached again to work for Studio W. Each time with a blurb in Variety celebrating how excited they are for the new opportunity, because the new place is just the bee’s knees. And probably with a bump in salary each time — but who knows what motivates the moves? Maybe Agency B is actually out of business by now, and everyone there had to find new work in a hurry. Their website is down, and the last time I did a gig for them, the place was half empty because they couldn’t bring in the work. Maybe that building where I cut commercials for horror movies into the wee hours of the morning is now a doctor’s office. The train rolls on.

I can’t help but wonder what I would have done, had I stayed in that business. Of two people I started out with at Agency X, one has carved out a niche doing boring but steady work at Agency X for nearly a decade now, while the other has worked at half a dozen different places before getting burned out and taking a yearlong sabbatical (an incredibly common chain of events in the advertising business). Would I have continued to hop from agency to agency? Wound up as staff somewhere and gotten comfortable? Quit the business anyway, a year later than I did?

I don’t think I have the qualities that would have assured me a lifelong career in advertising. I have an exceptionally hard time mustering creative enthusiasm for something I don’t fundamentally believe in and do not benefit from the success of. But I still look at those Facebook statuses like ripples in a tide pool. There’s so much activity there — organisms rushing from one place to the next; processes and systems churning away — and upon that volatility balance the lives and careers of people I care about. I don’t know what they get up to down there, but I hope it’s working out for them all.