The dick in the corner office

...and the last ox in the kraal

Hello!

A bunch of new readers signed on this past week. Welcome, welcome! You’re just in time for Love Letter’s third birthday and the gift that comes with it. If origin stories interest you, you’ll find some of Love Letter’s history here and here.

A very mundane thing happened to me, but it’s so exciting, I feel like I’m the first person it ever happened to. Like when you get a puppy or a baby. I have to tell you about the new thing in my life, and I’m connecting it to today’s Love Letter because why not just chuck it all together?

This is a chonky ol’ fatsack of a letter this, so read it in bits and pieces or get a cup of tea.

‘Work hard and be nice to people’. COLLAGE AND PHOTO: Karin Schimke

The dick in the corner office

We – the boss and I – walked into the office of the CEO for our regular weekly PR update meetings. On his credenza, beside the fruit bowl, two Granny Smith apples and a greenish banana had been arranged so that the apples represented a pair of testicles and the banana a penis. You couldn’t miss it because it was beside the bowl and not in it.

As I looked up from this juvenile display, he caught my eye and smirked. ‘Would you like some fruit?’

I rolled my eyes at him behind my boss’s back. The CEO carried on smirking.

This man was objectionable on every level: unpredictable, shouty and impatient, but also always full of The Jokes. You know The Jokes, right? The ones where everyone is duty bound to ha-ha simperingly because he’s the big kahuna.

I found him so irritating, that I never laughed at his jokes and if he told one and looked at me challengingly, I looked back at him challengingly, without laughing. I never said anything that could get me fired, and I’m not sure my boss – who was always her most obsequious self around him – had any idea of how badly I was behaving with one of her most precious clients.

I had a short career in public relations anyway. I hated it. So much pretence and false bonhomie and sucking up.

PR and marketing have always induced eye-rolling in me. This has to do mainly with my job as a journalist. As a reporter, it gets drummed into you hard to see beyond the story you get fed, and PR always felt like it was about feeding little fibs to the credulous and uncritical. To be convinced by PR seems like an exercise in parking one’s critical faculties.

If you can’t join them, mock them

When you deride something because you don’t belong to it, you need to use the qualities of the thing you deride to mock it. (I won’t make as though I am above that sort of thing. Punching up has its shallow satisfactions.)

The language of PR is such an easy target to laugh at. One of my favourite PR English sillinesses is ‘hence why’. As in, ‘The weather was bad on Thursday, hence why we moved the event to next week.’

I mean, why say ‘so’ when you can say ‘hence why’ and sound like a nob, right?

I heard it first in that very same fruity corner office uttered seriously by one of the CEO’s well-groomed, English-mother-tongue, university educated lackeys.

Forgive me if you use the phrase ‘hence why’ seriously, but I find it one of the silliest business-y affectations I’ve ever come across. And there are loads of silly language affectations and cringey clichés in the world of business promotion and reputation management.

Brand shmand*

The other word that has always made my skin crawl is the word ‘brand’ applied to a person. I’ve been working for myself for 25 years and have never thought of myself as a brand. Just a person. One who works independently.

I have also never had a website in all that time.

‘How do you get work?’ said my very clever friend Anneleigh, her eyebrows shooting up into her hairline.

That was when we first became friends more than a decade ago. We’d met at a writing group. It was just before I took the PR job and she was helping me accumulate my fractured post-newsroom career into something coherent for a CV.

My answer was, ‘I dunno.’

Word of mouth. Random alignments. Who knows?

Anneleigh is a marketing director, which is a title that doesn’t do justice to her talents and experience, all the intellect and intuition she brings to her work, and all her many degrees and qualifications. The reason I can work with her is because the ethics she practises in life flow seamlessly into her work.

For many years, she has tried to convince me to be more business-like about myself and what I do. She has been very patient and very diplomatic.

Last year I conceded that it was probably about time to get a website. It’s twenty-five years late, but as they say in Afrikaans, agteros kom ook in die kraal (the ox at the back of the herd also gets into the kraal).

So, dear, dear Readers of Love Letter, I am here before you eating huge slices of humble pie because…I am now a brand.

And can I tell you something? I don’t even mind the humble pie, because I finally understand – sort of – how a person can ‘be a brand’ as a way to present themselves understandably to the people who might need their services.

(*Brand shmand is a language construction known as shm-reduplication. It’s a way of conveying scepticism, irony or sarcasm. It comes to English from Yiddish.)

The becoming

Becoming a brand started with lots of meetings with Anneleigh (when you go to my website, you’ll find a picture of me and her black cat Hemingway brainstorming at her kitchen table), in which she did a series of exercises to figure out what I do.

What I do is so varied I’ve just never bothered to sum it up. Many cups of tea later, when we were done – and it’s not as simple as a summary; there’s lots else connected to it – after homework, research, thinking, and to-ing and fro-ing, Anneleigh consulted a designer she trusts and has a long history with.

Jonno’s job was to take all Anneleigh’s hard work and interpret it as a way to represent my brand for a website.

Well. Well. Well. Who knew? When I saw the design for the first time, I thought, ‘Oooooooooohhhhhhh! That’s how a person becomes a brand!’

It’s just…me, exactly as I am, but on a website. All along, I’d thought branding meant hedging, fudging or outright lying.

Branding is not a process of unbecoming your true self. Nor is it ‘unbecoming’ in the sense of the ‘unseemly’. Branding, it turns out, is a process of becoming a single, readable, coherent entity. Even just to myself.

Branding is a process of becoming a single, readable, coherent entity.

I said to Anneleigh once, when I was getting all lightheaded about seeing a virtual shopfront for myself, ‘Do people launch websites? Do they tell people about their websites?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘not usually.’

Oh well. I’m new at this. And having a website feels a bit like having a new puppy or a new baby (though a lot less messy and stressful) and waar die hart van vol is, loop die mond van oor, which is another Afrikaans idiom, meaning what the heart is full of the mouth overflows with.

So forgive me, because this letter is launching my website. If you’re the kind of person who stays at a race to clap for the last person to cross the finish line (or the last ox to enter the kraal), then this is the part where you clap.

Okay, but bear with me another minute

Because it’s Love Letter’s third birthday, I’m offering all my subscribers a sliding scale of discounts – depending on their subscriber status – on any of my services from now until Valentine’s Day next year (2026).

And then also

This year, there are going to be more thank you gifts for paid and founding subscribers. The thing I am most excited about is an essay competition for paid subscribers. More about that later this month.

If you can’t afford a paid subscription, you can share one with some friends by clicking here:

Okay. Enough! I’ll see you next week. And if you missed the many links to my website, here it is again: Karin Schimke.

With love, as always,

K (now also available as a brand, but otherwise unchanged)