Payin' Dues

Here's the ideal copywriting story that you hear told:

"We were up until 2 in the morning trying sell this copier paper. Nothing special. No great price. Just plain white paper. The client hates every idea, and shoots down everything we come up with. Then, we're all half asleep and Charlie makes a paper airplane and it flies around the office, and everybody gets the same idea at the same time: PLANE paper! That's it! The client loves it, sales jumped 9000%, and we deforested Brazil making paper. The end."

Here's how the story has gone for me lately:

"The account manger thinks I'm a shmo, but won't say it to my face. He hands me this doomed job and after five concepts the client likes the two most boring ones, one of which doesn't work. So I have 90 minutes to come up with brilliant copy for an existing storyboard, because we don't have time to change the visuals. I stare at the wall for an hour, read half a thesaurus, and come up with two lame ideas. Then I notice the account manager is having an impromptu copywriting session with the project manager and the designer without me. They develop their own lame copy without my significant input. Presumably the client is satisfied, though no one will give me feedback unless I wrestle them to the floor. The end."

Not that I'm bitter.

Understandably, this story gets told much less often.