Come to where the flavor is… Come to Marlboro Country
“Slide one arm of the safety glasses over the top of the left ear, then the right arm over the right ear. Slide the glasses on, making sure to cover both eyes. Make certain that the lens sits firmly on the bridge of the nose.”
The day begins with a safety video showing how to put on a pair of protective glasses. Outside, the fog clings low and heavy to the land, settles on my brain. It’s going to be a long day.
My assistant spends most of each day on extended forays into the uncharted vastness of the factory, each loop getting larger and more elliptical as she tries to locate the Creative Director. We need to get his signature on every shot before we can move on to the next. She’s rarely successful. We spend most of the day waiting.
Later – but only much later – we find out that there’s a reason for these unexplained and lengthy absences. As the saying has it, he would have been a person of interest to law enforcement. Later still, we find out that he had got past it, which heartened us to hear, for he was an interesting man. But the world can be a cruel place and clichés can come true: he was killed one night when he got run over by a bus. RIP.
And so we wait, clinging to safety barriers, trying to stay upright and awake. We try out the conference rooms, our heads swaying as we fight off sleep. There are counter cards along the length of the table: “You don’t have to smoke to work here. But it helps.”
In six-point type underneath, there are jaunty statistics telling you how many jobs rely on cigarette sales. The overall impression they want you to come away with is that the economy of the western world would simply collapse without cigarettes. The cleanest air you’ll ever breathe is the multi-filtered air in their conference rooms, complete with complementary cigarettes and ashtrays that appear self cleaning.
Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking…
Please note that the date for this previously published blog post has been assigned to create a sequence and not a chronology.
© Copyright Michael Harding