Confessions of a Placement
Mother guest edited issue 151 & this is one of the pieces they commissioned from... well, that would be telling.
Hello Mr Creative Director.
We have met before. Honestly we have. I was in a couple of your reviews. But I’ll pretend not to have met you. Just so I can tell you my name for the eighth time. And you can respond with some really inventive nickname like “Speccy” or “Posho” or “Beardy”. Before continuing to drone on at appalling length about the areola of some actress you were watching in a French film in Hampstead yesterday. A French film that you continuously mispronounce in your quaint, faux regional accent. Which county are all you creative directors from? Cuntshire?
Anyway, hello Mr Creative Director, I have a confession to make. I have stolen toilet paper from your agency. And lightbulbs. And bread. And boxes of cereal. I do this in return for having to force out laughter at your jokes. Jokes that are unfair on dads to call dad jokes. I do this in return for you paying me next to nothing. I do this in return for you saying “We all did our time” with a big daft cunt of a bleach-toothed smile. If I could, I would knock your fucking teeth out and sell them to pay the rent.
Mr Creative Director, why do you reference your own past work in creative reviews? You’re like a toddler shitting in a potty, pointing at it and shouting through your snivelling little gob “Look wot I done”. Mr Creative Director, why did you make me stay up all night image searching for a route you already killed? You’re the Hitler of Getty, only Hitler wore better shirts. And Hitler never wore his Fedora hat IN-FUCKING-DOORS.
Mr Creative Director, I have lost girlfriends, friends and weight. Gaining only debt, cynicism and trade ads. I say yes to everything you ask of me. I’m a re-drawing, re-writing, re-formatting, hashtag-explaining, drink-buying, shit-joke-laughing, heart-palpating, 3-for-2-headlining, let-you-take-the-crediting, BALL OF ROTTEN VENOM.
I confess to thinking about cutting you open with the blunt end of a Sharpie. But I once heard you tell an all-girl placement team that it wouldn’t do them any favours if they didn’t attend the Creative Christmas drinks. WHICH YOU HAD ORGANISED AT A TITTY BAR. So cutting you open would only bleed the faded pulp of Loaded magazines across the floor. And I want real blood.
Mr Creative Director, I know you will finally give me a job. But only once I resemble the shivering wreck of a war-torn refugee. Once I have “done my time”. And I confess the seething bitterness I will forever hold towards you will never really outweigh the joy. Because you broke me. And you smiled whilst doing it.
But the worst bit. The bit compelling me to bludgeon my own temple with your Cannes Lion paperweight, is that one day I will become you. I will become a sneering, cancerous tumour of smugness, on my second
wife, wearing a 15-year-old’s haircut and a French work jacket. And I will spout the very words to a placement that you once spoke to me, “We all did our time”. This inevitability is the purest of hates I can hold towards you.
The above is an excerpt from the current issue of shots, issue 151 [shown above], guest edited by Mother. To subscribe to shots and receive this issue's magazine, please click here.
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