The Existential Angst of the Monkey Copywriter

You sit at your desk day after day and you type and you type but you never really write anything.

It’s just meaningless words for a meaningless catalog that people only look at for the pictures anyway.

You type and you type and your head hurts from the sheer volume of products that you have to write about.

You lose track of individual sentences and paragraphs and you find yourself drowning in a sea of meaningless phrases.

“A must have”
“A must see”
“An incredible deal”
“An amazing bargain”
Great for doing xx”
“Ideal for xx”
“So tremendously f–king satisfying at accomplishing xx”

The words and the products and the information all jumble together so your head can no longer sort them all out.

Can you look for typos, read for content, verify the product information, and check to see if the pricing makes sense all at the same time?

You sit at your desk and you type and you type and you don’t dare get up because there is work to be done and you must do it.

There is always something else to write, always another deadline to meet, always another mess of words and information that you must somehow stitch into a Frankenstein monster of a catalog.

You dig and you beg and you borrow and you steal and you do the best you can to put the words together. Then you hope for a lightning bolt of creative inspiration that will somehow bring this creature to life.

And just when you think you’ve got things under control, just when it seems like your creature will live and breathe and speak to your customers, then pages get cut and products get dropped, and rules get changed.

It turns out that what they really want to do is send out a catalog that is half the size but has twice the products.

And thus the carefully stitched monster of spare parts that you have somehow managed to breathe life into is hunted down and torn apart by the mob.

And thus you must return to the graveyard of your thoughts.

You must once again dig up the same rotten words and moldy sales phrases, drag them back to your cubicle laboratory, clean them off and stitch them together. You must once again hope for the bolt of inspiration that will bring them life.

And you must once again wait and watch in helpless agony as the mob hunts down your wretched creation and tears it apart.

Got the Pre-Holiday Skin Crawling Working Monkey Blues

What is it about a vacation week that seems to slow time down to a crawl?

Your Monkey was wondering this today as he sat in his cubicle prison, watching the seconds tick with ponderous slowness toward the end of the day.

His muscles ached and he squirmed in his seat and he stared at the catalog pages he was supposed to be proofing until the words became blurry and he sighed and he wondered when it would all be over.

Time got so slow that it seemed to stop altogether. The world around him disappeared and there was nothing but him and an endless pile of pages and an endless amount of time.

He thought about leaving. He dreamed about departing. He fantasized about throwing off the shackles of his corporate overlords, unzipping his uncomfortable monkey skin and running full speed through his gray cubicle maze with nothing but his insides showing.

Oh, how he’d run! He’d run and he’d laugh and he’d cry and he’d give each any every employee a catalog page of their own to proof, and then he’d turn in his badge and he’d run out the door and go dancing into the streets.

That’s what he thought about doing. But instead he sat and he worked and he worked and he worked. And time dragged and dragged and dragged.

And with a brutal slowness, the clock finally reached five. And he was finally able to go home.