so far so good

Well, I’ve been at Mekanism for about a month and a half now, which I think is enough time to get a pretty decent read on the place. Here’s the good, the bad, and the ugly...

THE GOOD
I left a massive, lumbering giant of an agency, and joined a small, lightening fast, well-respected shop. When you’re in the business of creative problem solving, it’s pretty rare that layers and layers of approvals are going to make the ideas any better. More often than not, it turns them into warty, three-armed, club-footed Quasimodos with terrible B.O. By keeping the staffers to a bare minimum, we can focus on coming up with good ideas and selling them, rather than defending them against hordes of internal job justifiers.

I have a ton of faith in this shop’s ability to execute. Most agencies don’t actually make the things they come up with. Typically, they outsource that to a production company or a digital shop. I joined a place that makes everything, and Mekanism’s full of scarily talented weirdos.

I’m helping build an office. The company is based in San Francisco, and they hired me to be a lead creative here in New York. So far, there are 5 of us: two directors, a producer, an office production assistant, and me. It’s exciting, and scary, and…did I mention scary?

THE BAD
Right now, we’re in a temporary office at a place called Techspace, right near Union Square. It’s a tiny little 450 square foot space with no Wifi and bad plumbing. We’ve been searching like mad for 5,000 sq ft loft spaces in Soho, but in the meantime, I‘ve flooded the shit out of the toilet...twice.

Communication with San Francisco is less than ideal. First of all, there’s the three-hour time difference. Second of all, concepting sessions via conference call really suck. Every call sounds like a mumblers anonymous convention in an airplane hangar through a can on a string. We’re working on a solution for this.

THE UGLY
There’s a highly active methadone clinic/AIDS rehabilitation center on the 5th floor of this building. Which makes the incredibly small, maddeningly slow elevators that much less bearable.

Oh, and the elevators are under construction. So only one of them works. Which is awesome.

P.S. I was directly responsible for the appearance of this sign