I’ve told the story of the 2004 Florida hurricanes here before. But it’s relevant to what I want to talk about here today, so bear with me please.
A major hurricane landfall in Florida is a once-a-decade event. They usually either skirt up the east coast and hit the Carolinas, or they duck down around Cuba and spin off somewhere in the Gulf, but a direct landfall in Florida is pretty rare. By 2004, we’d been pretty lucky; the last real serious landfall was Andrew in 1992.
Hurricanes are evil things. They obliterate entire towns. They kill indiscriminately. They destroy property and ruin economies. And in the fall of 2004, Florida had five landfalls (counting one strong tropical storm) in a single month. One would hit, destroy the power grid, cause utter chaos, and after a week of Mad Max life, the lights would come in just in time for the next storm to come along and ruin everything again. After a month of this, many of us had become convinced that God just wanted to destroy us. That we’d never see electric light again.
Even when the lights came back on the last time, we didn’t trust them. Storm was the normal. Aftermath was the reality. We’d grown so accustomed to living in darkness and chaos, it took a while to readjust to things like light switches and televisions and air conditioning and pumping gas and buying ice. We didn’t really know what to do with daybreak, other than to distrust it.
So this morning I received an email from a Director of Communications with a reasonably sized energy company. I’d cold called these guys back in April, sent along writing samples, and was generally rebuffed with the “we got our own guy, and anyway we’re not spending money” answer we’ve been hearing a lot over the last eighteen months. She wrote to say that she’d been going through her year-end email, found my email from April, and it turned out they didn’t in fact use third-party copywriting services at all in 2009. But that situation may now be changing, and she wants to line up her resources for 2010. So she wanted to touch base and say hello.
In a normal economic year, this kind of stuff happens all the time. You call, or email, or write, and it just gets lost for a long time until someone ferrets you out of a file and needs what you have. That’s why you just keep sending stuff out – just because you didn’t get an immediate successful response, that doesn’t mean you’re not going to. Things do take time.
But since the end of 2007, it feels like we’ve been slogging through a desert in search of water. Late 2007 and early 2008 – the period that saw me moving to Modesto to live with my wife-to-be – also saw the beginning of some nasty happenings. One of my major clients stiffed us on a two-grand bill during the holidays. Other clients began to dry up. And then in 2008, more client defaults and lost projects and prospect voice mails that didn’t get answered. The storm was coming in, and all we could do was take it day by day, week by week, month by month.
At the end of last year, bad things began happening at Kristi’s job. You could sense it; it was just in the air. Budget cuts, tense times, administrators with the knives out, otherwise nice people preparing to eat each other alive. Kristi lost her job, not long after her grandmother died. Clients were still drying up for me; we were slogging through with a very small handful of our best clients and nothing much else. 2009 was a bad year, a rough and nasty year.
Faith and I have never been on the best of terms. But Kristi would keep reminding me that “we were always taken care of”. And somehow – against all odds, against any reason or logic – every month we managed somehow to stitch together the bills and keep going. Things always worked, often barely, sometimes by the skin of our teeth. But they worked.
As summer turned to fall, the winds were dying and the rain was slacking. This fall, we began to see a few rays of sunshine through the clouds. To be honest, it’d been so long that I’d nearly forgotten what sunshine was supposed to look like.
This energy prospect who emailed me this morning: this is normal stuff. This is what they’re supposed to be doing, and haven’t been doing for eighteen months. Between that and the work we’ve been doing with TUPC and the Salvation Army, and our plans now to become a full marketing firm in January, and Kristi picking up web design skills (and being good at it).. I’m seeing daybreak for the first time in a long time.
I’m feeling optimistic for 2010. We have good friends and family. We have each other. Clients are talking and spending money. Prospects are making plans and lining up help. Good signs are happening. It’s a good feeling, a reminder that the storm isn’t the normal – it never is. So now I’m looking forward to it not feeling like the normal.