The Yellow Button

My finger hovers over The Yellow Button. Four other people sit around and behind me, waiting to see when I will push it. If I push it, everything comes to a stop. If I push it, one of the nation's leading voice talents — the voice of Children's Tylenol, the voice of Massengil — will cease in mid-sentence. She's in New York, but it doesn't matter. The Yellow Button cares nothing about distance.

Today, this is my job. The sound engineer, my agency's broadcast director, the client's account representative, and a rep from the client itself — they're all watching to see when I will stop the talent and tell her I want a do-over.

She gets three paragraphs into her read. The script is for an interactive piece, not a commercial, so it's pretty long. Am I waiting too long? Should I have stopped her after just a few sentences? Am I missing some flubs that only trained ears can hear?

On the fourth paragraph, I hit the button. "Joan," I say to the talent, "that last line sounded...weird." Will she be insulted? Will this de-rail her flow?

"Yeah, you're right," she says with a slight sigh. "And I accidentally said 'upon' instead of 'on.'" I quietly pretend I noticed that, too.

With that, the pressure's off, and I actually start having a great time listening to a quasi-celebrity read a script I wrote. I stop her off and on...sometimes the engineer presses his own yellow button because he notices a sound hiccup or garbled pronunciation. Our broadcast guy notices one or two reasons to stop.

After each of my suggestions, the talent nails it. She's good. There's only one case where we have to re-do a line twice. After a mere 45 minutes, we're done, and the sound files are burning to a CD. Everyone's happy with the session (although, in fairness, they all credit the talent).

Bidding The Yellow Button a fond farewell — for now — I head back to the office to be a writer again.

It's things like this that make me love this job. Yeah, I have to write cheesy tag lines a few times a day, or come up with another way to tell you that you need another credit card. But I also get to write radio ads for the beach, "talking points" for a national morning show, and the season brochure for our community theater.

Last Friday, I got the traditional meat muffin breakfast at the office, then got a pizza lunch during our creative staff meeting — where we spent at least an hour watching funny commercials and viral videos. That afternoon, I was handed a beer at my desk when we learned we'd won a national ADDY award.

Right now, I'm writing a campaign for a brewery ... just because my boss asked us to pick a business at random and make some cool stuff for them, free of charge. Of course, the designer and I had to sample the beer during our initial "concepting" session. The door was wide open, and people who stuck their head in just said, "Hey, cool. We're doing a beer?"

Just thought I'd drop a note to explain what I've been up to at work recently. We'll likely have big house-hunting news soon, too. Stay tuned.