Waiting For Chip Kidd

A Blog@Newsarama post on Chip Kidd reminded me of a completely unrelated story...

When I first worked at DC, I was sent to travel across town to hand-deliver a package to Chip Kidd. Whether there was any need to have me hand-deliver it was debatable. Some colleagues questioned whether our messenger service, which usually handles such missions, could have done it. Personally, I think it was more a matter of my boss wanting to show Chip Kidd that he had a faithful assistant, a majordomo, a Gal Friday.

Anyway, I'm dressed in a suit and heels and I'm off to transverse New York City and deliver a package to Chip Kidd. When I arrive at the address, I am turned away at the door and told that all packages must go through the freight entrance. The freight entrance is tucked away on the other side of the block, and I had to be lifted to the platform by two workers. They take the package, squint and scrutinize the name, and summarily inform me that Chip Kidd is not at this address.

I'm sweating in my polyester suit, asking the men to check again. They call several people, who assure me that Chip Kidd does not work there. Do I have the wrong address? I go to a pay phone and try to call my boss, who is of course not there. I call people in other departments, frantically dumping quarters in the machine, hoping that someone knows where Chip Kidd is. Finally, somebody tells me that the address I was given was an old location. The new location is of course, all the way back across town.

At this point, my feet in the heels are killing me. I limp to the second location, thinking I could walk it no problem. Now my feet are bleeding. I go to the reception desk and deliver the package. By the time I get back to the office, almost four hours have passed. I think this was the last day I wore formal clothes to work, as well.

Now I think the punchline to this story is that Chip Kidd was actually at DC that day and could have picked up the package himself, though I'm not positive because it has been a while. But what I am certain about is that when he got the package, he didn't care for the contents inside, and in the grand scheme of things it made no difference whether I delivered the package, a messenger delivered the package, or even if the package was delivered at all.

But this is a good lesson for anybody starting in any field, especially publishing/entertainment. If you are an assistant, you will have to do things like this. It is a given. You will be sent on wild goose chases, you will be given tasks to do that seem on the face of it (and might actually be) pointless, you might even have to pick up your boss's laundry. I try to think of it as a zen exercise. If you can get past it and not let it bother you, you are a better worker for it.

A few things I've been asked to do in various assistant jobs early in my career:
* Travel across town to pick up large cans of a specific pesticide for our office plants (being told not to get any on my hands, because it could cause cancer).
* Feed live mammals to giant snakes. This was not a zoo I was working for, mind you, he had the snakes in his office.
* Spend three solid months on an article-clipping project that was eventually flagged as a money-waster -- all the work literally thrown out in the garbage in front of me.
* Make repeated excuses on the phone to my boss's angry wife to explain why he was not there (he was out with his mistress).

It's not the task, it's the discipline required to carry it out.

That said, I regret to say that unlike my "Waiting For Steve Ditko" story, I never caught a glimpse of Chip Kidd.