Beware the Sombrero: 5 Shockingly Melodramatic Things I Learned Doing Hard Time at LMC

Hey, it’s Charlie. I have officially managed to survive one full loop around the sun at LMC.

When I stepped foot in the office one year ago, I was both nervous and excited about the opportunity to work with an incredibly talented group of people and put my skills to use on a variety of fascinating new projects.

Now, a year later, the work continues to be as exciting as ever. The agency environment, which was foreign to me, has become more like family. And, provided Chris makes the coffee strong enough, we work like a well-oiled machine.

The only thing I have to fear is going out for tacos.

As a right of passage at LMC, it is tradition to take a moment to meditate on our personal growth on our LMC-iversary. What have we achieved? What have we learned? Are we eating our string cheese correctly?

Here are five important life lessons I’ve learned in my experience at LMC so far:

1. Live. Laugh. Let go.

When I started at LMC in April of 2018, I wanted to prove I had the chops. I’d spent many grueling years on my own in the freelance trenches, building a brand and making a name for myself. But LMC is an incredibly collaborative environment. Everyone has a hand in every project, reviews each others’ work, and makes recommendations/revisions – and the finished product is absolutely better for it. Sometimes ego gets in the way of quality. They’re probably rewriting this sentence right now as I’m typing it. That’s fine. I can handle it.

Lesson Learned: You don’t have to do it alone. And some days…it’s good to have backup.

2. You do NOT pull cheese

During my “interview” over margaritas at a local taco joint (where we spend a great deal of lunch breaks) the single most important question I was asked was, “How do you eat string cheese?” Because one faction of the office (Scott) vehemently defends his position that you bite it. Another contingent, i.e. just about everyone else, believes you pull it apart piece by piece, in strings as the name suggests. Kristin prefers a hybrid method in which you bite first, then pull. If you ask Scott (which I would advise against) cheese is not meant to be pulled.

I believe I was hired solely on the strength of my distinctive answer: That I preferred to live dangerously by not only pulling the string cheese, but following it with a Cool Ranch Dorito for that devastating one-two combo of intermingling flavors.

Lesson Learned: String cheese is a mysterious and polarizing food.

3. Laura likes to make me suffer

When I arrived at the office one crisp morning in early December, Laura casually said to me, “We were just talking about you! We were thinking you’d make a great elf.”

The fight or flight response activated. Cue the cold sweats and heart palpitations.

What did I just walk into?

Sure it could be nothing more than the lighthearted musings of a fun-loving extrovert, but Laura’s disposition became clear when we had a company lunch for my birthday (at that same local taco joint.) There, hapless victims find themselves at the unflinching mercy of the birthday sombrero, should they be unlucky enough to wander in on the anniversary of their entrance into this cruel world.

Beware the sombrero As I sat at the table quivering in fear, Laura eased my mind by assuring me she wouldn’t tell the waiter it was birthday. The moment after I thanked her for that kind act of mercy, I realized the waiter had been looming over my shoulder the whole time…and Laura had no intention of allowing me to escape my fate that day.

Of course, the torture is all in good fun (probably) and the LMC team has really started to feel like family to me.

In 12 short months, LMC has provided me some amazing and fun opportunities for new experiences, no matter how much they pushed me out of my comfort zone – which sometimes we introverts need whether we’re willing to accept it or not. It brought me to the historic theater for the downtown fall festival, where I got to put my “web” design skills to good use as we spooked it up for Halloween, and explore the old building’s dark crevices and subterranean caverns for evidence of its haunted legend. I helped Santa carry his bag (Christmas magic is heavy) and then he joined us for a jolly round of margaritas. Yes, at that same taco place. I spent a few hours hauling old seats out of the remodelled cinema, which combined two great things: my love for movies and the theater experience, and getting away from the computer once in a while.

And finally, I got to flex my skills on a variety of interesting projects, some a personal first, such as designing an ad that was displayed in Times Square. I’m still pretty stoked about that one.

Lesson Learned: Sure, I liked my desk in the dim, secluded corner rather than in the middle of the room, but comforts and routine stifles creativity.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bo1wHC8Berc/

4. Nobody puts Laura’s whiteboard creativity in the corner

The white board is for creativity, okay? So many design projects start with Laura’s ideas in blue dry erase marker, which eventually gets translated into something resembling a polished website or graphic design. The whiteboard is for freedom of expression. This is where ideas are born. You can’t constrict that to a small designated area of the board.

Lesson learned: The whiteboard is a lawless land where anything goes.

5. There’s always time to talk shop

At LMC we’re all creatives of some sort. Artists, actors, writers, musicians. And whether we’re talking about the latest book we read, or our preferred choice of recording gear, that drive to create is what makes us who we are and should be embraced. Not to mention those skills have definitely come in handy on a project or two.

Lesson learned: We bring a lot to the table with our artistic backgrounds, but maybe I shouldn’t ask Nick so many questions about “re-amping” in the studio when he’s trying to focus on something else.

In short, teamwork is great, and breaking out of routine helps keep the creative juices flowing…but beware a lunch invitation from Laura.