Fresh meat

Our new Executive Creative Director started work today. Pizzas were ordered for a lunchtime bonding session with him and the 3 new freelance creatives who also started work today. Our new CD has worked in Paris, Sydney and New York and apparently has enjoyed a highly successful career. He describes himself as a high-energy ADD personality, and came in today limping due to a skateboarding accident (he's 40). He believes that a creative department should be a giant 'playpit', and that come 8 o'clock at night people should be reluctant to go home in case they miss out on further excitement.

While I could buy into the notion of spending my days frolicking in a playpit, it was hard to keep a straight face during this last statement. I have trouble envisioning the nightly events that would detain us at work past, or even up to 8pm. Frankly, only being involved in a seedy office affair can provoke that level of fascination with the workplace. I will watch with interest to see what changes he manages to effect during my notice month.

One of the new freelancers we met today is already showing promisingly loony behaviour. Everyone at the table had to introduce themselves and give a brief biography, and she went into agonising detail over all of her last three retrenchments. Personally I would have tried to withhold this information from my new workmates.

I hear delicious reports that the Red Queen's new enterprise is proving less than a runaway success. Times are tough and they are finding it hard to land new business. And quite who would be getting their hands dirty actually doing the work, should they land any, remains a mystery. Certainly not Her Majesty. But while I would be delighted to see her limp away from a failed endeavour in abject humiliation and base poverty, I feel uneasy at the possiblity of her return to the mainstream agency scene...