It was the end of my first week at the new firm and I had it coming. Saturday night just before I left office, they dropped a bomb on me. It was no ordinary bomb, it was one of those carpet bombs that gets into every nook, every corner, every hole and every crevice imaginable and goes boom! But me being me, I survived to tell this sordid tale.

So On Saturday evening as I was sitting down cozily and brainstorming about banner ads for M*******n, I was told that a major FMCG company had given us a brief for a product and I along with the three trainees who had joined with me were supposed to prepare a pitch for it and present it by Monday. Yay! Wait a minute. Wasn’t Monday like less than 2 days away? Crap!

I looked up the client brief. The product we guys, yes all four of us are guys, had to market err, umm, uhhh well, how do I put it, erm, sanitary napkins. Assuming that you have gathered yourself from the floor where you lay laughing I will take the liberty to proceed further. So we were supposed to prepare a pitch for a campaign where we would through various forms of online media change the image of the product from being just another sanitary napkin to, get this, a reliable friend, trusted guide & credible philosopher! And that was not the end of it. It gets even better.

Before I get on to the next part I would request some discretion on the part of the audience. Also I would request you to try and make sure you are not eating or drinking anything when reading this as I am not going to be liable for any damage to your electronics or brain cells. Ahem. So the second part of the brand building was to, get this, *drums roll* sensitize men so as to evolve them as influencers in the decision making process. Yes I had the same blank expression on my face for almost 3 hours after I read it, before my brain finally, although reluctantly, agreed to cooperate and I was able to move on.

Thankfully when Monday the pitch got deferred till Wednesday allowing the four of us to find more about menstruation and the whole shenanigan. I tried to find information from where ever I could. I googled, yahooed and wikied. I bugged a few girls at work. Made the mistake of asking some girls not from office and my IMs and cellphone were inundated with not-so-flattering nicknames and jokes. Yes you, you know who you are and I know you are reading this too, smirking as you recall all those horrible thins you did to me! I even tried to get in touch with my feminine side but apparently she was PMSing.

Any way loaded with more information we ever needed to know, we sat down to make the presentation. I left the presentation part to the 3 guys. It was their domain. SEO, SEM, CPA, CTR mean as much to me in English as they would in Spanish. Me no comprendo!

I, being the copywriter, constituted the whole design team for the project since we didn’t have a designer amongst us. So I sat down and pulled ideas for the campaign ads out of my ass…err….i mean head. Yes head. Thats what I meant.

The D Day came and we submitted our pitch for review and it came back faster than we could breathe a sigh of relief. Apparently there were a million things wrong with it and a billion things needed to be changed before the 5 pm presentation. Despite my brain telling me its time to panic and run around in circles, I managed to coax it in to working for a few more hours. So in 3 hours we trashed and rehashed our presentation and by the end of it we were ready to be baptized by fire and brimstone.

Come 5’o’clock and the E-N-T-I-R-E company crammed in to the conference room to see our presentation. They all seemed very eager with their razor sharp claws glinting in the now blinding lights of the room, as my brain took refuge in the deepest, darkest corners of my head. They were on to us like movie critics on to RGV’s movies. Now we knew what is the mob justice they talk about in news. We were caught in the projector light like deer caught in headlights. And the deer had much better chances of survival. We were no match for them. It was like paper fighting the paper shredder. So sharp were their claws that they even shredded our hair into nano fibres. So much blood shed over a product that, ironically, promises to stop it.

A few more minutes and the house keeping guys would have had to literally mop us up off the floor and walls and table and chairs. What happened next shall forever remain within those walls. If I tell you I will have to kill you or resign.