So a while back, I wrote a post about Martin Bassot.
Martin worked for me at R/GA as a very talented comms/connections planner but then fucked off to Wieden+Kennedy.
Anyway, as part of his leaving present we gave him a jigsaw.
Of himself.
You see as one of his bucket list goals before he turned 30, he wanted to do a big jigsaw.
There’s 2 very big problems with the previous sentence.
1. He was incredibly talented and only TWENTY BLOODY NINE.
2. The other was he wanted to do a jigsaw as a life goal.
Christ!
Anyway, because I’m a bit of a prick, I found the photo of the one time he wore a suit for work [to pick up an award, the bloody corporate crawler] photoshopped it onto a pic of a ‘used car forecourt’ and made that the image of his jigsaw.
Zoom forward a few weeks and we caught up.
I told him it was because I wanted to see how he was doing, but it was really to make sure he was not letting Wieden down, as I still feel a ridiculous sense of loyalty to Dan, given all the mayhem I apparently caused when I was there.
So the call started off interestingly when the Crystal Palace supporting scum came onto the video chat sporting a background specially designed to provoke trouble.
[See photo at the top of this post]
He would have got away with it too had he not later sent me a photo of where he was at with the goodbye jigsaw.
Amateur mistake.
You see, at the time of writing this post, he has been gone from R/GA for 2 months.
THAT’S EIGHT WEEKS.
And not only was he working from home for most of that time, he had 2 weeks off sick …
That means, he had 1,344 possible hours to finish this jigsaw … and how much has he done?
This much …
And to think I thought he was one of the brightest minds I’d met.
Pah.
On the bright side, showing his jigsaw dyslexia to the World [or the 8 sad bastards who visit this blog everyday] is some sort of revenge for the Forest Shit zoom backdrop.
And yet I still like him and miss him.
I’m a saint. A bloody saint.
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UPDATE:
Since writing this post, Martin sent me a message saying he had finally completed it.
Worse, he said it with a distinct ‘smugness’ in his tone.
OK, it was an SMS but I could still sense it.
So I sent him a 3000 piece jigsaw of this.
That’ll teach him.
Probably for the next year.
Cue: Evil laugh!