Thursday, August 10, 2006

Moving to New York.. not Montreal

So, Korea is off until March. Which leaves me stuck in Inner City. A lovely city.

By which I mean stenchpot

But by staying I will be able to pay for my "Just Barely Accredited" BS and Masters degrees. So I suppose that's good.

And the marketing gig is actually better than ever. I have been shifted to one of the colleges and we are (ahem!) kicking our sister college's ass. The other college never listened to my advice anyway, so they deserve the pit they seem to be falling into. As it looks now, I have made the right marketing decisions and they have made bad ones. We'll know in a bit less than a month.

The move to the new college brings the predictable bullshit. We don't have much of a budget at Inner City College and so I do the marketing things that I think work best. Our administrators (even the great one I'm temporarily working for) see things other colleges are doing and then wait on them to bring them up in meetings. These admins (again, excluding the one I'm temping for - and provisionally my "real" guy) are so tight that they could hold three greased quarters between their knees while juggling seven red-hot pennies. But when they talk to me they mysteriously lose all track of budget realities. I assume it is the fact that my chiseled jaw and noble profile make them assume I am a multi-millionaire and infamous rake in my spare time. Otherwise it just makes no sense.

It goes like this:

Administrator: I was over at the Fluffy Poodle strip joint the other day and I noticed that the strippers there had (name of other college redacted) logos on their nipple pasties. Why don't we do that.

Me (Pausing): I'm, ... uh... aware of that adverstising opportunity. But (other college redacted) spends about 5 times the money we do (I no longer even mention they have 5 positions in marketing and we have 1). So, what we do here at Inner City College is spend our money in the best ways we can.

Administrator: Yeah, but, (name of other college redacted) is advertising at the Fluffy Poodle.

Me (Choking back the blood from the tongue I just bit): Well, we look at the demographics, the reach and frequency we can get, and our budget, and we do what is most efficient. I can give you the demographics we are reaching for and....

Adminstrator (Impatiently): I understand that you spend all your money. But why aren't we advertising on the nipple-pasties at the Fluffy Poodle? The other college is.

Me (wondering if a bullet really tastes that bad. Hell, you probably don't even taste it if the muzzle velocity is high enough): If someone can convince me that this will reach more potential students than what we currently do, and I need some numbers, then I'm fine with doing it...

Adminsitrator (Reaching for some imagined version of benevolence which includes a notion that I am dumb as a stump): Oh, I'm not questioning what you are doing. I just have a question about why we aren't in the Fuzzy Poodle. On the nipple pasties.

it goes on like that... on some other occasion I'll have to talk about how instructors see all this and the inevitable rolled eyes when I mention that we might all just want to look at where the political parties advertise because.. .and follow this, because administrators don't seem to get it.... they are extremely fucking results oriented!!!!

For now?

I think I left something sharp in that nice warm bath I'm running. Better go check it out. ;-p

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