It might have been unprofessional but I’m glad my mistake made people laugh

I’m in trouble. The #Yne wellness Post-it campaign has been a huge success, in terms of the number of times the company hashtag has been used on social media. The problem is that the Post-it note social media users have shared most often is one that was never meant to be seen outside my kitchen. Somehow the bright pink note onto which I had scribbled “Blah, blah, blah. Some patronising crap about wellness”, while trying to work out the best pen to use for writing 300 aphorisms, made it back into the pile that George and I stuck on lampposts all over Clapham and Balham.

I was called to a Zoom summit with Bella my boss, who told me that she’d had to tell Saskia, #Yne’s founder and my biggest client, that Bella Vista PR would not be charging for the Post-it campaign after all. Even though technically my single errant note had been shared many more times than outlined in the “successful outcomes” table we’d prepared for the exercise.

“And the #Yne hashtag is on that Post-it,” I pointed out, during my virtual dressing-down. “Perhaps we need to suggest to Saskia that this is subversive advertising at its best. People are far more likely to remember my sarcastic note than any of the usual platitudes. They’ll still want to know what #Yne means.”

Unfortunately, Saskia did not agree. Saskia is very serious about wellness. Deadly serious. She even suggested to Bella that I be sent for re-education. She said, and I quote: “Trudy seems to be holding a lot of anger in her solar plexus. She might benefit from a course of meditation.”

Bella promised she would look into it. In the meantime, I had to apologise in person. Well, not in person – over Zoom – but you know what I mean. Saskia nodded wisely as I suggested that lockdown had soured my attitude to life but I had come to realise through my mistake that I needed to be the change I wanted to see.

“Just like Michelle Obama said,” Saskia responded.

“It was Gandhi, you moron,” I howled after I ended the Zoom call. Or rather thought I had ended the Zoom call. Saskia was still there, staring in horror as I pulled faces and flicked the Vs at my laptop camera.

“Sorry,” I said when I realised. “I really need that meditation app.”

“The link is on its way and I’m sending you waves of love, Trudy,” Saskia assured me. “Really big waves.”

I was drowning in them. Then I went online to check the Gandhi quote and was mortified to discover that he didn’t actually say it either. He said something altogether more poetic. “As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him...”

My colleague George was sympathetic to my plight. Not least because he had been there with me when I undertook #Yne’s promotional littering drive.

“I feel bad,” he said. “I might have stuck that Post-it up. I didn’t actually read any of them.”

“I don’t blame you,” I assured him. “I wasn’t exactly engaged in the process either. In fact it was almost certainly me who made the mistake and put my snarky message out there. It’s my self-sabotaging sub-conscious in action again.”

“All the best people are self-sabotaging,” said George. “Show me a great artist who hasn’t fucked up on their way to fame and fortune. Just look at Sheridan.”

George was on first name terms with Sheridan Smith. At least, in his imagination he was. He went on: “If this was the Nineties, you would have been poached by Trevor Beattie on some seven-figure salary by now.”

“But that’s the thing, isn’t it?” I said. “Being cynical is old-fashioned. It is the Nineties. It is the FCUK campaign. Now everything is ‘be kind’ and ‘be happy’ and ‘nourish’ and ‘nurture’ and ‘thrive’. But you know what, seeing those messages on everything from T-shirts to yoghurt pots hasn’t made me feel any better at all. What it has done is make me feel like the bad fairy at the christening, hating all the shiny happy people who can feel uplifted by a proverb on the tag of their tea-bag.”

“I hear you,” said George.

“Don’t say ‘I hear you’,” I said.

“Alright, you silly old bag, I feel your pain. Drink? I’ll meet you in the surge-testing queue on Clapham Common.”

We didn’t go for a drink. The temperature was briefly above freezing that day and you couldn’t book a table in the bin yard of my local for love nor money. I stayed in and tortured myself on social media. My mocking Post-it was still doing the rounds.

I’d wanted the whole thing to just go away, but perhaps the fact that people were sharing my stupid note was a sign that I wasn’t the only person who felt harassed by the constant reminders to “be happy” when there had been days during lockdown when it felt hard even to “be awake”. In fact, I thought as I scrolled through the various Instagram posts (amazing how many angles people can find on the same image), I’d go so far as to say that all the endless exhortations to take care of yourself were borderline bullying.

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Perhaps those strangers on social media were feeling the same way as I did, like they could use fewer reminders on their tea-bags and artisan tagliatelle packets that perfect happiness could be within reach, if only they would make more effort. Isn’t it just cruel to suggest people should just try harder to be happy when every day the news if full of new variants and we still can’t hug our grans?

Saskia sent the link for the meditation app. I deleted it without clicking through. I was sorry I’d been unprofessional but I wasn’t going to be sorry that my mistake might have given a few people a much-needed laugh. Or snort, at the very least.