He Was a Joke
About 13-14 years ago, I was working as a web designer for a dot-com. In our immediate group were a creative director, a creative manager, and two of us who were designers. We were all part of the marketing department. The creative director was a joke.
He was brought in by the previous VP of Marketing, who he was friends with. He hardly did any work himself, and just played online poker waiting on us to send him things for approval.
And he’d never stick around late when the rest of us needed to stay late to hit a deadline or deal with a crisis, etc. The creative manager, who’d been in charge for a couple of years before the creative director’s hiring, still ran the day-to-day.
So, the creative manager gave his notice that he’d accepted a new job, and when I met with the current VP of marketing to discuss transition, I mentioned that the creative director would need to step up and pull his weight.
I guess a similar message was expressed by a number of people, and less than a week after the creative manager’s last day the creative director was fired! This kind of sucked because we went down from 4 to 2 people in our group.
I was appointed acting creative manager, and we eventually did hire one more designer. I left the company a couple of months later, too, after the latest VP of Marketing was let go and there was going to be a 10th different person overseeing marketing in my 5 years there. And the jerk creative director?
He’d reached out at some point (looking for files for his portfolio, I think?), and it happened to be in the two-week window where I’d accepted my next job but hadn’t yet started so I mentioned my new position.
Well, he fires off a copy of his resume to the company president and tried to poach my new job out from under me!
On my first day at the new job, the president mentioned that somebody else from that same company also applied for the job and forwarded me the application email to see if I knew him… saw that the date was after he and I had last communicated! Story credit: Reddit / blipsman