How You Know It's All Going to Go Horribly Wrong – Reprise

When you're on the second day of a two-week shoot and at lunchtime you miss the crew van, and you end up in the agency van, and you overhear this conversation:

Client: I just don't get why we're doing this. I hate everything we've done today.
Agency Creative 1: Well, we're not all that happy with it either…
Client: I mean, it's supposed to be about moms being creative and all she's doing is dumping out a bowl of Cheez-Its.
Agency Creative 2: We wanted to do something with the popcorn too, but the Reddenbacher people would only let us do it if we showed the whole thing with her taking it out of the microwave and smelling the popcorn --
Client: But how did we end up with this? How did this get decided?
Agency Creative 1: Well, you were on vacation.


Agency Creative 1 does not appear for the rest of the job.

They add an extra day to reshoot day two, and you spend the next five days plus one waiting around, wondering why you're waiting around -- until you realize it's always for agency approval, on everything from how the Powerade bottles are positioned to how the bag of Ruffles is placed/dropped/tossed into the shopping cart. Which is not that different from a normal commercial, actually…except that they somehow manage to spend half an hour on it, as opposed to ten minutes.

But you learn a lot about the new iPhone applications from the camera dept. Shazzam is pretty cool. So's that thing where you get to watch the beer fill up the screen.

You start to think that if the rest of your working life is going to consist of days like this, maybe you really do need an iPhone.