Makin’ Us Proud

An interesting thing happens en route from planting a wee lil’ seedling of a hair-brained scheme to growing it all the way into a full-grown bounty o’ warm sun-kissed harvesty goodness! Somewhere in the process from idea to outcome, you’re forced to assess why you came up with a particular idea and why you want to see it through.

Case in point: Several months ago one of my co-workers, Erin Potter, approaches me with the most unholy of all concepts—nominate your boss of 6+ years to win a prestigious award based on their character, selflessness, and…ugh I shudder…general good nature to boot! No one wants to be THAT employee. You want to be the co-worker that can knock back the most shots at happy hour. Not the brown-nosing one that nominates the boss for an award. Freakin’A, the humanity!

Alas, I got an e-mail from the aforementioned partner-in-crime suggesting we nominate our boss, Charlie, for the Richmond Ad Club’s “Ad Person of the Year” award. She prefaced her case with a disclaimer though. She WAS just recently returning from maternity leave and said 92% of her sentiment could just be post-pregnancy hormones. I thought that was a safe bet, but figured we should forge ahead and see where this goes.

Fast forward to approximately two months ago when the call-for-entries was announced. I got a quick e-mail from Erin asking if I still think this is “a good idea.” “Psh, sure, why not?” I say! So we blindly agreed to do this. Don’t tell anyone, Scout’s Honor. That was our agreement. If he doesn’t win, we don’t want anyone to know what we did. We don’t want him to be embarrassed or disappointed. We didn’t want the acrid stench of complete and utter failure wafting above our noses if this doesn’t work out. So we stayed quiet, but worked on the nomination despite this.

To complete the nomination, we were given the task of answering a few questions and writing a couple of essays. Erin answered the questions, filled out the forms, and I began composing the essays. An “ode to the boss” if you will. The first question asked, “How does he contribute to company morale?” The second inquired, “How does he give back to the Richmond community?”

Funny thing is, the two essays had to be 500 words or less, and each one I wrote was 850+ words which required extensive cutting and editing from Erin. Hmm, I guess there was more to say about him than I thought! When I sat down to this task, I just started typing and the answers came more easily than I had imagined. I surprised even myself, which is dag’non near impossible. I swear, I felt a faint sheen of ice melt off my heart as I wrote those freakin’ essays! Because much like the Grinch, my wee heart was “two sizes too small” as well. Ugh. Yeah. It’s quite unnerving indeed.

After the questions and essays were submitted, all we had to do was wait. Well…wait…and maybe try to unknowingly lure our boss out to various “Richmond Design Scene” events that could potentially be a benefit if he made his presence known in front of judges and other design biggies. Oops, did I just confess that?

After the essays were in, the secret campaigning was done, we were left with more waiting. About a month passed after all this, and Erin and I began to think that our efforts would indeed come up fruitless. We both braced ourselves for that “sorry, not this year” call from the judges. Yet, that call didn’t come. The call we got instead, was “Congrats, Charlie Connell was selected to receive the Richmond Ad Club’s ‘Ad Person of the Year’ award.”

WHOA! Really? Like…seriously? Ok, ok, you can tell us, he was only one of two people nominated right? No? The competition was in fact steep? Huh. You don’t say? Not that he didn’t deserve this…but I’m not so accustomed to winning myself. So a win for Charlie is a win for me…it’s a win for the whole office! Once the surprise faded, as a whole team we had the joy of calling Charlie whilst he was out-of-town for business, to give him the good news! And what’dya know? He didn’t believe it himself!

Now we had a winner! We had high office morale and good vibes emanating from the staff. So then we began to really plan.

The entire team had a few days to whip up a movie and/or slideshow about the man and his career. True to our nature, we worked hard, as a team, and we did it! We got the Richmond Times-Dispatch to do a story about us. We got our photos taken. I literally felt like a celebrity for about 4–5 seconds last week. You know, JUST like Brangelina…minus the 24 kids.

All the hard work was so worth it, too! The days (and nights) spent creating this team slideshow. The nights spent writing the essays. The months leading up to the nomination. Seeing the dude that you begrudgingly have to admit that you may actually like and/or respect acting genuinely touched was totally worth it!

The Richmond Ad Club awarded Charlie with his “Ad Person of the Year” award on Friday, April 15. The majority of the team showed up all decked out to support our boss as a group. We screamed when he approached the stage. We stood. We did the “slow loud clap.” And we collectively rolled our eyes when his speech continued on and on and cut into our open-bar time. But we stood behind him as a whole. It’s touching, yes. But we did it because we all knew he deserved it.

Sometimes you learn that your boss is a bit more than just a boss. He’s a deserving fellow that may potentially, possibly, kinda, actually, sorta, quasi be worthy of the props given to him. You want to recognize him and give back a little of what he’s done for you (which I confess is a fair amount because I am NOT always the most pleasant to work with under tight deadlines). But it was all great. The company continues to grow and unite. The team is full of high morale. And most importantly, the office still has a couple bottles of booze in the kitchen-area left behind from the celebration…should the need arise! And all of this is what’s produced when you take a seedling of a hair-brained scheme, and allow it to grow into that full-grown bounty of harvesty goodness.