The Apprentices

This was written sometime in 2001 after my first day of work in an Advertising Agency. Oh, and we (Saps and me) actually had the gall to submit this along with our first assignment, which was to write a synopsis of a book on Account Management. Luckily our boss had a good sense of humour or we would have been fired the very next day!


With hearts beating rapidly, they crept into the office - only to find their boss glaring at them.

"Your assignment," he thundered, dropping a book that could have been a combination of a large sized dictionary and a telephone directory (complete with yellow pages) in front of them.

The book, weighed down with knowledge overflowing from it, sapped their energy as they hobbled over to the desk with it. On opening it, they gasped, for in it, lay a whole array of words strung together to form undecipherable sentences. The more they gazed at it, the more it swam before their eyes, distorting all images of what is and what is not.

Focusing their combined energy on J. W. Thompson's Account Management, they unsuccessfully tried to decode the mysteries of how to become an Account Manager, but no matter how much they tried, the truth always managed to elude them.

Under the watchful gaze of the frowning boss, they pretended to be engrossed in the adventures of the account manager, while all the time contemplating, "Why meeeeeeee?"

As the telephones noisily came to life all around them, they could feel their own life seeping away until, by noon, they were nothing but wilted wall flowers, just sitting there.... withering away...

Finally, their grumbling stomachs brought them out of their stupor and they decided to appease their hunger. The unappetizing food revitalized them and filled them with the desire to catch the bull by its horns, or, rather, the book by its covers and just go for it. So, with light hearts and heavy stomachs, they headed back to the office only to encounter - The Book.

They threw themselves wholeheartedly into their first assignment and, in their (un)deranged state of mind, somehow, to a certain extent, managed to unravel the great mystery of - The Account Manager.