workingfortheman.com

Some call him the Marketing Guy. I call him Roger. I first met Roger the day I received the offer to become Harbor Publishing's next editorial assistant, and that moment began what would prove to be a year and a half worth of mystery, mirth, and microwaved mochas.

Roger stood a sturdy 5-foot-nothing or 4'13", depending on your perspective. Dressed in his uniform of khaki pants and button-down striped shirt he cut a swarthy figure as he walked into Harbor's two-room office space. Each and every day he would come sauntering in, pretty much whenever he felt like it, and pretty much looking like the day before. It was an example I took straight to heart. In the months to come I would look down to Roger as a mentor of sorts, a tried and true warrior of the way of doing nothing. It is a zen like art that takes years to master.

Roger was the official marketing guy for Harbor. And much like Harbor's vaporware product that never seemed to actually get released, Roger's job was never done, simply because it was never begun. Often Roger found himself much more occupied with trying to fix other people's computers. Hours of Roger's days would be spent hovering over the computer consultant guy, asking him questions about the CMOS and the autoexec.bat, and whether or not all of our problems would be solved once we upgraded to Chicago -- now more popularly known as Windows 95 (alternatively known as Mac 85, but that's a different story).

Another of Roger's more frequent job-related tendencies was what I came to understand as the coffee conundrum. Whenever Roger showed up for work he would usually have firmly in grasp a towering cup of coffee, most often a cafe mocha. Let it be known that Roger was what some people called a little scattered, though I think he just had too much on his mind.

His mochas usually sat on his desk, cooling off to a very unappetizing room temperature. The conundrum would begin when Roger would attempt to heat his mochas in the company microwave. Of course being so busy, he would often forget about that mocha in the microwave, thus that Start button would need to be pressed yet again. And so on and so forth.

Many a mocha were left undrunk by good ol' Roger.

But above all else, I enjoyed Roger's stories that he would tell me on our frequent smoke breaks. He smoked Winston Selects. A favorite tale of mine that he told involved a group of Europeans having sex in the swimming pool at his apartment complex. His attention to detail as he recounted the story helped me to understand just why he was Marketing Guy #1 at Harbor. Of course he was the only person in the marketing department, but that's neither here nor there.

The wisdom did not end there. I can recall many moments around the water cooler or down in front of the building, Roger telling tall tales, the wizened smoke of the ages billowing out of his head. He told of the freaky circus sex he had in his office after hours, and of the many old and desperate women he chose to consort with ("makes it easier to leave them if they're sad and old," he would say). He told of Who concerts, ex-wives, and just how easy it is to get a reseller's license and buy cheap cheap software. He demonstrated to me the ease and efficacy of ripping off one's corporate identity from none other than Microsoft. My mind boggled at the wisdom of printing our software manuals at Kinko's. The lessons I learned from Roger are too numerous to tell in this space.

The lesson I present to you, dear readers, is to never take for granted what you may find lurking in your company's marketing department. Sometimes the greatest gifts can be found in the smallest packages.

Sure, Harbor only had 4 or 5 employees. Sure, we had a product that never came out. But therein lies the wisdom of Roger. What better employment for a marketing guy? A company with nothing to market. Not a day goes by where I don't think fondly of my formative years with Roger. He took me under his little wing, and I thank him for it today, right now, as I type this at work. Here's to you Roger. May you forever find pleasure digging around in other people's hard drives. May that mailing list never be complete. May you one day enjoy the sensation of a scalding hot mocha. And may you never get caught fucking middle-aged women on your office desk.

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