Early this morning I opened my email, and there in the in-box was a Golden Ticket.
It was an email from a fancy schmancy New York ad agency. I had been referred to them by one of my occasional LA clients, a client that thinks very highly of me, although not quite highly enough to give me any work. The New York agency specializes in Broadway. They were looking for someone to design the logo and graphics for a new, multimillion dollar Broadway production. The LA agency gave them my name. They said I was perfect.
The job was mine. Did I want it?
Hmmm... let think about that. Million dollar Broadway production... tons of exposure.... gold in my book.
Fuck Yeah!
I dashed off a response. It was 7am, 10am in NY. I hit "send".
And then I heard the soul crushing "DONK" you get when the email isn't connected to the internet.
Sure enough, I pulled up the browser and got the dreaded "YOU ARE NOT CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET AT THIS TIME".
What to do, what to do? I wasn't panicking, not just yet.
I unplugged the modem and the router and gave them a breather. That usually worked.
Nothing.
I re-booted the entire system. Again, nothing.
Then, I realized what the problem was. SOMEONE forgot to pay the cable bill. AGAIN.
I quickly dialed up the cable company. The phone still worked. When you don't pay your bill, they sever your internet knowing that will cripple you, but they leave the phone on so you can call and beg mercy and pay your bill.
I went through the phone tree and was put on hold. Forever. After 20 minutes on hold, I got the bright idea to send NY an email through my phone. I quickly tapped out an email, but I'm not very good at texting and I noticed the message kept auto-correcting. To what I couldn't tell you; I was shaking in rage at that point.
I hit "send" and.... nothing.
I had the hold music blaring at me through the speakerphone and was staring at the little "send" icon blythely spinning around.
Finally it stopped and said something about not being connect to a "stmp path" or... I don't know. I have an art degree, I'm not Steve Jobs.
Then it occurred to me... I also have a Gmail account! I'll use that!
I typed, if that's the word, another email. Couldn't tell you what it said. I was blinded with rage at that point. I hit send again and... nothing.
And it's only then I noticed the highlighted Bluetooth icon on my phone. It turns out both accounts were trying to access the home modem. Which, in case you haven't been following along, was no longer connected to the internet.
Just then, someone answered the phone!
And HUNG UP!
I called back again and got "ALL CIRCUITS ARE BUSY AT THIS TIME..."
Maybe it wasn't a billing thing.... maybe it was an outage?
I call back a third time and actually get a human. It turns out the account is fully paid (thanks, Honey) and there are no outages. I get transferred to Tech Support where we quickly discover the problem is with the modem. After a couple of minutes, the problem is resolved and I'm back online. I immediately hear my initial email reply "zoom" out. And then a second later, I hear my frantic follow up emails "swoosh" out of my phone.
That was seven hours ago. Never heard a word back. It's nearly 7pm in NY.
I'm fairly certain I didn't get the job.
I'm hoping it's because I just didn't reply in time. Time was of the essence and it was given to someone else.
But who are we kidding. The poor guy got slammed with three emails from me, two of which were probably so incomprehensible they looked like they were written in Klingon. I came off looking desperate and a little, whats the word... INSANE.
These are the days I just want to stick my head in the oven.
But it's fucking electric.
