One of my Marketing Managers was gone for most of last week. She was back today so when I ran into her I asked her where she went. You know, making small talk to schmooze the people I work with. She told me that her boyfriend moved to Colorado and she drove with him to help him move.

Now, while that answer might not be up there with "my father died and I had to go to the funeral" or "I had a gynecological condition I had to take care of" in terms of awkward conversation topics, boyfriend moving to Colorado and helping him move is kind of up there. Especially when I've been there for a month and haven't quite gotten to the level of schmoozing where I know how to handle things like that. As a result, I basically froze up and held tight til I was rescued by another Marketing Manager with whom I quickly rifled with questions involving her projects.

We're also working with an agency that helps produce some of the stuff we're working on. Now pretty much everyone I work with doesn't like the agency and thinks they're a waste of money. They're expensive, way too high-maintenance, and screw up a lot. The people at the agency who are at the front lines of all of this are the Account Executives- in other words, the 24 year old, fresh-faced, low-paid grunts who think Advertising is the place to be. My AE, who is also the AE most everyone else uses, gets the brunt of it mainly because she's the one who deals with us. Whenever she screws up or the agency does, she gets it and because everyone's looking for an excuse to ditch the agency, everyone's looking for any sort of slip-up to hold it against the agency. Except, of course, me. Girlfriend is a nice Jewish girl and we like to do right by our fellow tribesmen. Girlfriend is also hot 24-year old Jewish girl and well, girlfriend could accidentally take all of my projects, take them to a bar, spill Jager on them, and then accidentally leave them on the Cable Car and I'd let it slip. Probably even defend her to my bosses. In other words, she doesn't have anything to worry about with my projects. In fact, she's probably got one pro-active, easily reached, extremely talkative contact she has to deal with, one who'd never ever rat her out. And is that so wrong?