Imagethief

Month: June 2025

  • Good PR People Don’t Lie

    Also, a dumb theory of lying in PR

    I stumbled into a PR career ass-backward. I say this with love and respect for those of you who dreamed of a PR career, went to PR school and diligently worked your way up. But that’s not how it happened for me.

    It was late 2001 and startup number two in Singapore had imploded following the collapse of the dot-com bubble and some poor management choices. Italian furniture isn’t cheap. Six years and two dead startups into my Singapore journey, it seemed like time for a change of vocation. Also, no one was hiring “Internet” people in 2001. Sitting in the oily puddle at the the bottom of the trough of disillusionment, we were best not touched with bare hands, like medical waste.

    Some of my beach football friends worked for the Singapore office of a small New Zealand-based PR firm. They had a problem in the form of Microsoft Singapore, one of their clients. Nobody at the agency knew much about technology, and the notoriously demanding Microsoft team was losing patience.

    On the beach, a ropey and affable New Zealander, who was amazingly fit and fast at the inconceivably geriatric age of 45, made the pitch. I had worked in radio and television in San Francisco and co-written two books about computer games, and I had just done several years of technology project management and had a good grasp of Microsoft’s products. Had I ever considered working in public relations?

    I had not. Not only that, but at startup number two I’d held our PR woman in cold contempt. I didn’t understand her job. Her requests seemed burdensome and trivial. I had important things to do!

    Karma is, as they say, a bitch. I owe her the hugest apology.

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    I met the agency’s Singapore office leader, Kylie, a radiantly charismatic Australian woman who was the team rainmaker. “Ehhh,” she drawled when I pointed out that I had zero PR experience. “You can write and you understand tech. We can teach you the PR bit.” Also, she offered double what anyone would pay me to do Internet related work.

    I negotiated the final details of the job a week or two later, while in Laos with my father, standing ankle-deep in the Mekong in Vientiane so I could catch a Thai cell signal from across the river. And that is how, at the age of 34, I made a mid-career switch into comms. And probably also got some kind of hideous river-borne blood parasite.

    Read the rest on Substack

    Don’t be a serpent.

  • Pitchwrap Supreme

    The art of getting your stoner snack into the New York Times

    The last time I remember being in a Taco Bell was in the late eighties, when I was a student at U.C. Santa Cruz. My buddy Darren and I had just completed a round of epic late-night bong rips at an off-campus house and the munchies had arrived as inevitably as the tide. The Taco Bell on Mission Street, around the corner, was open until the wee hours. As we waited in line, Darren slowly read the menu out loud:

    “Nachos.

    Nachos Bel Grande.

    Burrito.

    Burrito Supreme.

    Burrito Supreme…with hair.”

    I don’t remember if we actually ordered anything. Or, if we did, what it was. But it says something that the image of a Burrito Supreme with hair has been stuck in my head since 1989.

    A lot of my college experience lay at the intersection of my friendship with Darren, our youthful love of the herb, and snacks. There was the time we dried some leaves from the plant in Darren’s room in an electric kettle (not recommended!), smoked it all and then bought every cookie in Sluggo’s, the dorm coffee shop. After dividing the cookies, we slunk back to our respective dorm rooms to devour our prey in solitude, like stoned leopards.

    Read the rest on Substack

    For your munchies…

  • Decapitation!

    Doing comms when a leader is ousted. Also, travel fun!

    I just got home from a trip that took me around the world, from San Francisco to Amsterdam, from Amsterdam to Taiwan, and then back home.

    I arrived in Amsterdam at 6AM on a Monday morning with a full work day ahead. It’s always a treat to stay awake and productive after a sleepless flight and an early arrival. By the afternoon my eyeballs are vibrating like tuning forks. Finally going to sleep after one of these days is the purest bliss. It’s like rediscovering the whole idea of a bed. It’s so soft and welcoming and flat!

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    The hotel in Amsterdam was joined to the airport by a long corridor, which was convenient for everyone flying in for our event. But I stayed in a room with an inward-facing “atrium view” and for three days I saw little unfiltered daylight. This creates a space-station vibe that is bad for your body clock. Who cares what time it is when you’re unshackled from Earth’s natural rhythms like a Morlock?

    After a long-haul flight, the thing I want most is a shower to remove the film of plane-sweat and the lingering scent of disposable upholstery and economy class ravioli. The hot shower is one of the crowning creations of industrial civilization, something so pure and good it seems impossible that you could fuck it up. Unfortunately, some malignant tinkerer invented the “rain” style shower head, the kind mounted in the ceiling directly above you.

    I assume hotels install rain showers out of sadism. The shower cubicle is inevitably designed so you have to stand directly under the shower head to use the valves. These will be elaborate, like the controls of a steam locomotive, and nothing will be labeled. Just a collection of unmarked brass cranks and levers. I guess wrong 100% of the time and get blasted from above by the initial rush of cold water. What’s wrong with on/off, hot/cold? If I wanted horrifying Victorian plumbing, I’d live in London.1

    Then it was on to Taipei, a brutal 18-hour travel day. I had a three-hour layover in Munich, so I tried to talk my way into a Star Alliance lounge on the back of my outrageously expensive airline-affiliated credit card. According to my inexpert reading of the alchemical matrix on the credit card’s website, this should have worked, but the woman at the counter wasn’t having it. There is no walk of shame longer than the one after you’ve been tossed from the rope-line of a middlebrow airport lounge by a woman with a German accent. No cheese cubes for you!

    Flying from Europe to Taiwan is weird now due to the need to wind around various war zones and hot spots. The flight path looked like the pilots were slightly drunk and having trouble flying in a straight line. The world is troubled and unstable and everywhere there is strife and tension. If only there were something—some kind of Forum—where leaders from government, business and civil society could come together to discuss meaningful solutions and collaborate to make the world a better place…

    Hold that thought.

    Read the rest on Substack

    Let’s talk about your severance…