What…Medicine?, 2 of 6: Evidence Walk: The week of August 23-27, Part 1

[In the series of blog posts headed “What in the Name of Medicine?,” “medical media” may be used as a generic term for medical advertising/promotions, as a general field or as to a type or collection of firm(s). It does not refer to genuine medical academic publishing. Edits done 1/2/13. Edit to title 7/2/13.]

Monday, August 23 (slept 4.5 hours):

Tweedle Dum was back from her vacation.

One of my first items of business (a personal sort) was to copy some of the pictures that were tacked up on the bulletin board in the Lizard. I just felt that things were getting weird enough here, that I could use the pictures as evidence “in case…” (not for court, was my thinking early on). There were about eight of them, mostly fake magazine covers—someone, obviously a production person (because I typically didn’t have access to, or knowledge of, the kind of online service that allowed you to do this) had utilized some Web site called “FaceinHole.com” (or close to this URL) to make pictures—of magazine covers, or pictures with a celebrity—in which someone else’s photo’d face could be inserted into a hole. Georgia’s face (the same photo for all, I believe; it could have been taken at work there with a cell phone) was in a hole in all the pictures. So she was (face only, not body) on this magazine, on that magazine. She was one of a couple in a picture with George Clooney—see this sample. I have the original copy at home; here, I covered her eyes to protect identity. (I have another, of a fake Vogue magazine cover, which looks particularly bawdy with the addition of handwritten things by the production person, if someone doesn’t believe what I have. Also, I covered the eyes on this other one I could show.)

This type of picture looks like some hijinks of a high school sort were going on. I believe they were made on Thursday, August 19, while I was out. The point here: If people should claim I was harassing Georgia, what about these pictures? I believe the production person (a male) who made them was someone Georgia was flirting with, which actually was remarked on by ES (as if she thought it was cute/worth approving) on Thursday, August 26.

Shortly after I got the copies, I went to Georgia, who was newly in. She asked me how Saturday had gone, and she had a weird way of asking; I’d indeed sent her an e-mail on Saturday, when no one was in yet, and I had wondered if people were coming; I expected she wouldn’t see the e-mail till Monday, since I knew she wasn’t to be coming Saturday anyway. Her way of asking me now about Saturday was rather amusing—as if I’d never worked on a Saturday before. Here’s some hint: in the early 1980s, and even in late 1979, I worked evenings and (occasional) Saturdays many times. Here is a copy of a letter of reference on the most important job I’d worked at in the early 1980s, before Georgia was even born, where I typically worked on Saturday (and Sunday) nights almost all the time. (I’m not criticizing her here, just showing how little credit she seemed to be giving me here, however excusably.)

Sometime in the morning I found that a Suboxone item that was coming through again, and Georgia had written in a comments section, “Changed again!” as if in stark frustration. Someone else had then harshly crossed this out (probably an account executive). I didn’t blame Georgia for this.

At about 10:35 Tweedle Dum was in the editorial area, with Tweedle Dee. She said she felt like a “ball of stress.”

At about 12:00 Tweedle Dum passed through the editorial area, gave a selective Hi to ES, then passed by my cubicle, clearly saw me, and said nothing.

Some other time she was in the editorial area and looked at an accumulation of Suboxone satchels, put at the bin for such by Georgia, and Tweedle Dum shrugged and gave a gesture of scorn—I interpreted this as somehow aimed at Georgia. Why she did this, I don’t know. The Suboxone items were generally being handled in about as timely and heavily-moving a way as they ever had.

At about 12:40 I almost bumped into Tweedle Dum as we moved near each other in a narrow hallway space. First time I ever encountered her directly this day. I don’t know if she said Hi or not. If so, it was slight/adventitious.

In the morning, or by about midday, I had gotten two of the brochures I was supposed to have worked on on Saturday. At about 1:45 Georgia, clearly seeing I was swamped, brought me a third, saying she gave it to me “for consistency.” I had (and have) no problem with this move of hers.

Though I was tired, more or less as on Saturday, I somehow was more effective on these brochures than I had been on Saturday. I think this was because workdays usually bring the competence out of me even despite very short sleep. I surprised myself a bit with how I could work on these things on Monday, which were a bit boring apart from my being tired. Their virtue was they were fairly simple.

In the afternoon, there was a passing, almost wordless exchange between me and Georgia in a hall, where I was carrying work for another trafficker, and she was coming the other way, past me. I won’t describe this more, other than that there was nothing flirtatious about it, and it would be an important prelude for something that would happen the next morning. [DOF]

At about 4:55 I brought the last of the, in total, four brochures to Georgia. I had pushed my way through them, by a force of will connected with a surprising ability to process them well enough. “Good job, Greg!” Georgia exclaimed, in a way that surprised me a bit then, and surprised me in later retrospect. I explained to her I’d gotten a bit cursory toward the end (with the last brochure, essentially)—just to be clear what the editing situation was (in fact, the whole criterion was to get those brochures done that day).

On this Monday, I had slight anger but was constructive—unlike the dragging condition I was in Saturday.

No one else (among the editors) was doing a second reading of these brochures. I don’t know if one was specifically requested on their cover sheets. It would have been normal good practice that there was such a requirement.

Tuesday, August 24 (slept 5.25 or so hours).

The Lizard looks-exchange incident

At about 9:45 I passed down a hall, able to look into the Lizard room, where the Suboxone task force was usually camped out. In general, I looked in there so many times, just to see who was there, if not looking for Georgia (for some purpose). I was carrying a work item. This moment, I looked back to see who was there—my only purpose—and I was not obsessively looking for Georgia. I saw her peering out at me, as if she’d been anticipating my looking. She had rather angry-looking, bitter, suspicious eyes, and in this was a little weird looking. She was like someone too innocent/naïve to be registering such indignation. [DOF]

Back around August 6, she had looked in to me, when I was in a meeting room on something unrelated to Suboxone, with a sort of eagerness (not necessarily flirtatiousness), a more innocent time than this late-August week. No problem shown there; I didn’t glare back. And recall her “hungry eyes” as I mentioned toward the end of my October 22 blog entry.

I had been heading somewhere other than the Lizard. I was a bit disturbed by her personal-issues look toward me. I went back to the Lizard, to “reorient her to work reality,” in part. I wanted to touch base with her (on something schedule-wise, I think). She was busy talking to someone else in the Lizard related to “if you have kids,” as if giving a general view. I gestured to her outside the door of the room, and she readily came to me. We talked amenably enough on the work matter.

At about 10:35 I heard that Tweedle Dee would have EW, the new addition to the editorial group, sit at J. McC.’s desk—J. was out for the week. “They didn’t assign me a space, so…” Tweedle Dee said to EW.

At 10:45, I was moving through a hallway, and happened to hear—emanating from the Lizard, and I wasn’t even within eye view of the room—a startling exchange: Georgia was talking in what seemed an unusually indignant way for her (she was soft-voiced, and generally seemed not to have enough heft to speak really commandingly with people directly before her, especially when a more seasoned, “horsey” trafficker might have needed to do that). And Evelyn R., one of the Suboxone account reps, saying to who was apparently Georgia, “Of course, honey! That’s what men do!” [DOF] There could be no other person Evelyn was talking this way to—which was in a bit of a condescending tone—than Georgia. And the issue being addressed could only have been—though I was hurt to discover this, as if struck by a lightning bolt—Georgia’s beef with me. Georgia who was the one other person I dealt with the most in those last weeks, other than slippery “director of editorial services” Tweedle Dee. Georgia who, along with me, was key to the Suboxone account. She complained about me, who was the essential editor for her account in those six or so weeks up to my last day.

[Please note what this drawing of inferences means (and it will help those understand why a person with my work experience can seem to “nurse grudges” about things from a work issue years before): The media world is very much one of dedicated “fanatics,” crazy dreamers, sickos of various stripes, and so on. Egos bash together in this world all the time. Not all “causes for fights” can be pursued; you very much pick and choose your fights. And most troublingly, there is rarely a fair “adjudicatory” process within this world to settle disputes. Many times grossly high-handed, one-sided, dictatorial moves are made to “settle” disputes. When this happens, those on the losing end can be hurt for weeks, months, years. And it’s their right to remember this hurt; in some ways it gives life meaning, and provides a spur to learn. In moving forward within a rocky office experience, the real art to dealing well in this world is to reasonably address disputes as they occur, be patient, and try to be understanding (even William James or any other master of empathy would be tested in this regard in some of these disputes). When I draw out implications here, it’s not like I’m ready to slap this attractive but occasionally selfish and occasionally fibbing person in her face. I’m showing what her move meant at the time, and hopefully how out of place it was. A more mature woman (or one with less of a personality problem, as I believe Georgia has [this sounds a bit rough, but future info will clarify my intent, such as on the "Jersey Mountain Bear" blog]), would not have done what I just recounted. And a more mature larger office culture would not have put stock in her complaints to the exclusion of mine. Lastly, I believe Georgia has been complicit in some later behaviors of some [Agency X] people in a way that is far more concerning than this minorly telling deadline-oriented incident described here. The later behaviors, which extend over a much longer period, are more ambiguous, and actually are documented, in part. Back to our story.]

In no other medical-advertising gig within nine years had a young woman ever made such a disloyal move as to raise this kind of issue and not remember that our WORK relationship came first, and that she (by the end of my gig) should have shown some trust/gratitude to me when I made a special effort to turn voluminous items over for her rapidly. (If you were to point out that there might have been a genuine “unwanted sexual come-on-from-me” issue on her part, I would hasten to note that, as my narrative is showing, Georgia showed me decisively mixed signals. In part, her “professional woman’s firewall” regarding flirting was not well built at all. And whatever particular issue regarding any “come-on” that she had with me was remarkably inconsistently displayed. It seemed to me that generally, certainly starting in immediate retrospect, stresses were making her appear a little destabilized, not to say she was inherently unstable independent of—and prior to—what Ferguson was posing. All this can be further demonstrated in another venue, which I don’t foresee publicizing at this time. Also, I was sensitive to her displays of stress *from the project*, which also included anger, and it has added to my distress over the larger mess here that she didn’t seem to understand this.)

Georgia never approached me directly, to speak in an adult fashion, about any personal issue with me. And no one else at [Agency X] ever addressed Georgia’s issue with me to me directly, discreetly or otherwise.

I got some corroboration for what Georgia talked about with Evelyn when, later, Evelyn and I were discussing something and she rubbed my arm and said something rather patronizing. This was a “reflection,” so to speak, of what she apparently thought Georgia had complained about. ESSENTIAL POINT: I HAD NEVER TOUCHED GEORGIA INAPPROPRIATELY, AND HAD NEVER MADE A LASCIVIOUS OR OTHER SUCH REMARK TO GEORGIA. Georgia’s beef, as I understood, had to be only regarding looking at her. (For Evelyn to “echo” the issue as she rather seamily did with me is rather par for the course for the characteristic occasional phenomenon of females’ crossing boundaries of manners and good taste at [Agency X], and this particular example has offended me only somewhat. What is a little more troubling—actually, a lot more—is that Georgia’s issue with me wasn’t addressed in an appropriate forum, such as human resources, in handling the matter respectfully, with acknowledgement that all sides had rights, and discreetly. It would take Tweedle Dum, on Thursday/Friday, to deal more directly with the matter, and then the move used was crazy and legally quite questionable, as we’ll see suggested in a future entry in this series.)

I personally and strongly feel that what Georgia was complaining about was minor, and doesn’t reflect on her being terribly adult in the matter. But I would have been willing for her to have her issue heard in an appropriate, legal manner, which is why I handled e-mails on my last day, August 27, as I did. (We’ll get to that.)

##

At about 11:00, I talked with Tweedle Dee about the P.I.s to come. He revealed he had been asked in an e-mail the night before (from Georgia? from Tweedle Dum?) if he would have more than one person proofread them? Which was the sensible thing to expect, and would have conformed with all relevant standards in the matter, as I’ll come to again in Part 3.

A while later, I felt tired as I worked. I was bitter about Georgia. I reflected how she never engaged in small talk with me of any sort, as a coworker would ordinarily do with another worker with whom he or she was closely and continuously involved on a complex project. Virtually not an item of small talk. She was a blank to me as far as this was concerned. What this means today is that, if a broadcast alert was sent out days later about how I related to her, it was skewed toward her interests far out of alignment with what common sense would have dictated regarding who was being adult and professional in the circumstances.

At about 11:55 things were OK between me and Georgia when we touched base on when the P.I.s would come. She was forthcoming, didn’t seem paranoid or self-righteous regarding me at that point. (The winds did shift abruptly with her.)

At about 2:30 I was preparing to leave for the day. There was no more major work I could do; for one thing, the Suboxone items that were reserved for me, which were to come from the client, hadn’t come yet.

Wednesday, August 25 (slept 5.75 hours).

In the morning I found that both ES and EW had been here late the night before. Part of the apparent reason, concerning ES, I will discuss in Part 3, subsection II; she had been working on one long project that ran from midday Monday to the end of normal workday on Wednesday. Whether and why this led to her staying late on Tuesday, I don’t (and can’t) know. As for EW, on the other hand, he was rather writing his own rules there anyway. We’ll see this in detail in Part 3.

            The med guides: where a piece of evidence is at hand

Wednesday was my longest day there in 2010, and had my longest stints of work for any Suboxone materials. I indeed would work on the first two iterations of two versions of the Suboxone film P.I.s, for work time that totaled several hours. But first, I worked on two (I believe no more than that) “med guides” for Suboxone—which are FDA-approved and normally accompany consumer-distributed, prescribed packages of the medication.

In my hasty scramble to accumulate some evidence as things got crazy there, I was able to get a copy of the cover sheet for one of these med guides, and this would be essential to my complaint to the FDA later that year, and should be very illustrative for you. Here is a copy of the cover sheet, with the [Agency X] corporate logo and the Ferguson name (and account number of the item) blanked out. If you’ve closely read my description in Part 1 of this series on normal production processes with layouts and mechanicals, you can then interpret this item, and see how it reflects the anomalous procedures being used at Ferguson with the Suboxone account.

Let me make very clear up front: I am not saying Georgia handled this in an incompetent way. She was doing what was set up for her to do by the client’s demands, the condition the materials were in, the tight deadlines, guidance by account executives, and so on. Where there was a falling short that there shouldn’t have been was in the number of editors assigned to this account through the weeks I was working on it, which wasn’t my fault.

This sheet was probably filled out, mainly, by a production person. You see “SF Med Guide” near the top—this means “Suboxone Film med guide.” Georgia’s handwriting is at the “Editorial” request section, complete with her smiley face.

First, this sheet designates the version of the item as “FINAL MECHANICAL.” If you read my description of the production process, you would know that this was highly ambitious, if not a little crazy. It’s like designing a schedule to make a movie, and only giving three days for postproduction, without anything else beforehand (even principal photography). Now granted, the item was already written/edited into shape by the client, and had (I believe) been pre-approved by the FDA. So, being “final” was not so crazy. But essentially you hoped that it was sufficient to give this item two proofreadings, in one pass each by a reader, as was typical for a “final mechanical” in a more normal process. In this case, they would have been the only two reads by Ferguson editors that it had, at least in the production milieu I was in.

Let’s look more closely.

Georgia’s specially written “HOT” means something is urgent (she gave this designation to several items in my last weeks there). “ASAP—DR Today!” means “as soon as possible—disk release today!” which means something is very close to final; disk release typically means something is going to the printer. (That is, at this stage, an item is in digital form in our hands, being worked on to get it up to final snuff, and when it undergoes disk release, it goes to the printer—though perhaps at a later point an upgraded version will be subject to another printing.)

“Two Full Reads,” as checked off, starts to show where things were screwy. Many of the items I was required to read in my last week there were designated—this essentially came from an account rep/manager on our side (not Georgia alone, I believe), and was essentially meant to meet some expectation of the client’s—as needing two full reads. But in actual fact, in my last days there, they were only getting one read, from me. I had been the “dedicated” editor for this account since sometime in July, but there was no other editor set up to do second reads on these items in my last one or two weeks there.

Once, I believe on Thursday if not Wednesday, I even remarked to Tweedle Dee, the “director of editorial services,” that a second reader was needed, and he uttered some sort of agreement, but he never arranged for this to be furnished. (We’ll come to this point again when I discuss the P.I.s. in Part 3.)

Look again. The next direction—again, Georgia was working reasonably (and probably per account executive guidance) within the metes and bounds of the strange situation—really brings home the weirdness: “r[ea]d against clean copy from client word for word the same! Thanks [smiley face].”

For one thing, not that I blame Georgia, any sudden “need” to follow the copy precisely was hardly an issue. As I have suggested in my earlier description of the Suboxone production process, with less crucial, sales-type items, certain copy details were being changed by the client, and then provided to us as “gold standards to follow,” almost on a daily basis, with no room for editorial emendation (such as a comma in the wrong place, or absent and needed). And then, often, the Ferguson editorial department’s demanded task (coming through the account reps, mainly Evelyn and KK) was to do “two reads” “ASAP” and so on. And indeed some of this incorporation of changes to sales items was still being done in my last week there.

But with this FDA-approved item, the matter was even simpler. This was one item—there were several—where the client was issuing a version to be used, as I said approved by the FDA. For this to not need editorial changes so much as simple checking to be sure the laid-out copy matched a Word doc “backup” was not so strange. What was unusual was the rapid and “one set of two reads only” process. What was in fact a stark deviation from procedure (as I had understood it for years, following typical medical-ad convention) was that two reads, which had been clearly requested, were not getting done here, only one.

My med guide work went on from (I have long kept exact records on such stuff in my medical-ad work) 10:08 to 10:29 a.m., and 10:36 to 10:54 a.m., and 11:11 to 11:24 a.m.

The P.I. work I did—with the first iterations of the six-point and nine-point versions of the Suboxone Film P.I.—went from 1:25 to 4:14 p.m. (with breaks).

No second read, as was clearly requested on the cover sheet, was done. (And if one was, this would have been obvious; hours of such work by an editor (any other editor) was notable. ES, of course, was primarily involved with the account she was dedicated to; EW, as we’ll see more, was in his own world, and he was not much of a hands-on proofreader—and definitely remained aloof of the P.I.s, as we’ll see in angering detail in Part 3.)

Sometime in about mid-afternoon I found Georgia in my cubicle—I’d been away—and she was leaving me a note about the Suboxone “master visual aid.” She saw me coming and she explained what her note was about, with enough equanimity. I have the original, on a Post-it, of this note. [DOF]

About 5:35 Georgia put a non-P.I. Suboxone item in the bin of pending editorial work and said to me that someone else could do it, “so you can rest your eyes,” she said.

A second version of the P.I. (two versions again) was coming (or to come) through. An outside vendor had been laying it out, and would electronically send it to us. We downloaded it, printed it, and were to read it here. The whole process was bizarre and ran contrary to how P.I.s were normally handled, from what Tweedle Dee told me and from anything I’d ever witnessed at medical-ad firms. This will be looked at closely in the following blog entry, on “The Geek,” under the subsection “II. The handling of the product information documents (P.I.s) in August 2010, in general.”

I would read the second iteration of the two versions of the P.I. from 5:54 to 8:04 p.m. When I left for the day (given a blessing of sorts by Georgia), I was beat.

Before this spell of grinding work, dinner was served to everyone involved in the Suboxone account. This is a typical medical-ad industry bonus, dinner being bought by the company, if a project group was staying late.

I was in a “foosball room” where food was laid out. A number of us were in there, several males, and Georgia. I was smiling in response to what one of the males said, and looked toward Georgia, if not wondering if she got in on the joke, then to show her, “See, I can smile too!” She looked away from me evasively.

This is a test: here we were among others. There should have been no threat perceivable from me. I wasn’t reaching out to paw her. I was doing my “sociable at work” thing (as rare as that might be). And she was reacting in a selective, one-on-one way to me. Not to anyone else there.

It doesn’t matter if anyone else there picked up on this. I witnessed it. And as it came in the “keeping honest” context of a group, I wasn’t crazy.

Georgia had some, so to speak, neurotic issue about me.

And through all this, I’ve tried to defend her rights. Not because I was in love with her. I actually didn’t quite know by about this point what to make of her (in terms of the integrity of her personality and how resolved she was to do capably in this job). She was beautiful, true. But there was something emotionally “off” about her. But I tend to give new such coworkers the benefit of the doubt—we were all there to do sophisticated work. And she was young. And as with her, I see headstrong or flighty young women all the time.

And, as I said earlier, one benefit of this sketchy but representative account is that I show that Georgia was giving off decidedly mixed signals to me: positive and amenable to involvement at times, and skittish and elusive at other times. And her Tuesday morning glare out of the Lizard room at me was downright grim. Mixed signals from her: so important to consider, and to be verified and further explained by other means, if needed. [DOF] 

Even so, in this case, however she got “neurotic” about me was parlayed into something quite bizarre by the end of the week—and pretty much destroyed my prospects for working in any medical ad/promo gigs again. She couldn’t anticipate this would happen; who could?

##

At one point during my slog through the second iterations of the P.I., I was pausing, tired. I was doing something in my briefcase. Georgia stopped by. “Taking a breather?” she said. “Yeah,” I said, clipped. I didn’t feel that with this I shortchanged her by not talking much; after all, she had done next to no small talk with me in the past.

Later, at the Lizard, after I was done with the second round of P.I. work, she—after checking with KK and/or whoever else there—said to me, “You’re good to go. Get some rest.”

This was the last truly sane direct involvement I had with Georgia. Things would get distinctly more nuts the next day.

I forgot, but it’s OK narratively to be here: At 11:00, Tweedle Dum, the intrepid trafficking manager, came into the editorial area. She needed an editor to join in the Suboxone meeting about to start. She was with a writer for the account. They agreed they would not use a “freelancer”—meaning, me. Who had turned around over 100 items for the account by that point, as no one else there had.

Shortly after, I saw who Tweedle Dum’s editor of choice was for the meeting: Tweedle Dee, who had just arrived, and who I found was in the Lizard without even having unpacked yet—he still had a jacket and/or bag of sorts with him, and he sat there as if he was out of his element. He looked a little bored/disengaged. No wonder: he had had so little to do with the Suboxone items for the past several weeks, or months.