Leave It To Beaver

While the rest of the world is on a train to Edinburgh I have been temping.

This was how the advertisement described the job.
 
We seek candidates with enthusiasm, outstanding verbal communication skills and solid administration experience. You will be calling potential participants of The Beaver in the Woods campaign, to obtain their email address to forward relevant competition information. You will also be required to enter details into a database and take inbound enquiries.

The campaign is not actually called The Beaver In The Woods Campaign. I have changed the name just in case someone from the real campaign stumbles across this blog as I really need the money and I'm hopeful it's going to provide invaluable material for this blog.

The is how the advertisement should have described the job.

We seek candidates with enthusiasn, outstanding verbal communication skills and solid administration experience to cold call people about a campaign they will not give a shit about.

Here are the benefits, as described in the advertisment.

In addition to being part of an exciting national project, you will be paid a competitive hourly rate and work either part-time (3 days per week) or full time hours within a fun and friendly team in stunning CBD offices.

Here are the benefits as they should have been described in the advertisement.

You will be paid.

They were telling the truth about the offices. Like a fish in a fortieth floor fish bowl I've had nothing to do but circle and pooh and look at the view. My workload for my first two days has consisted of looking at a website, setting up my email signature and reading a suggested script for phone calls which I will not use.

This is how the campaign would work if it involved beavers. Imagine a world where you needed to fill a beaver to receive an income. Myself and two other eager beavers will be calling every company in Sydney that supplies beavers to ask them to put their most exciting beaver on our website. They cannot just make up a beaver, it must be a beaver they really need to fill. Once lots of beavers have been listed a panel of celebrities made up of AFL players, radio DJs and the guy from 'Who Wants to Be A Millionaire' will decide on the top ten most exciting beavers and then the public can use online or SMS voting to determine the 'Ultimate Beaver'. The person selected to fill the Ultimate Beaver gets showered with prizes and the company I work for gets 17% of the value of all the beavers filled as a filling fee.

The fundamental flaw in my opinion is how do you quantify the value of a beaver?

Is this beaver...

better than this beaver?

I suppose at least with beavers you could measure their teeth, tail and dams however the entity I'm dealing with has hundreds of unqiue variables that have no relation to each other and are absolutely meaningless if compared. This is maybe why after one month and thousands of calls only one beaver has been listed on the Melbourne site and that beaver came from one of the sponsors. I've even heard that this beaver is in danger of being pulled because the sponsor is embarrassed  and doesn't want their beaver associated with a big cock up. The Melbourne competition has just finished so at least the task of the judging panel and the public has been simplified.

I'm sorry for being so obtuse but I hope you get the gist.

What is intriguing is the dynamic of the team behind this car-crash of a campaign. The creator and leader is an oblivious alpha-male who has jetted off to Sydney to set up the media launch for the next competition. The leaders underling is terrified of the leader and insists that the same failed approach be taken for the next stage of the campaign. He also says 'cut and paste', ' don't reinvent the wheel' and 'if it ain't broke don't fix it' at least three times every hour.

The leaders PA kindly showed me where the staff kitchen was. As we both stirred our tea she nervously glanced left and right and up and down before whispering, "Nothing is as it seems. Don't believe anything you hear." Before I could reply she scurried back to her cubicle. I couldn't follow her back because I didn't have a pass for the door so I completed another circle of the building, stopping at the toilet halfway round. As I completed my circuit I could feel the eyes of the other employees peering at me from behind their beige dividing half-walls. There was desperation in every pupil. They were pleading with me to ignore the giant white beaver in the corner, to put my head down and beaver away even though the dam was well and truly busted.

And this is what I will do. If nothing else it will be a sociological insight into how ridiculously expensive and fundamentally flawed things get made.

I will also be paid.