Goodbye, Harvey D.

In advertising there are blazing stars, wunderkinds who flash their creative brilliance and awe the industry with their genius. They are often called onstage during award shows and congresses.

Then there are the solid ones, those who toil tirelessly every day and are able to finish any task on time with the minimum of fuss. They do not deliver breakthrough work of staggering genius; rather, they are consistent in submitting works that solidly work. These are ads that make the clients happy and the ordinary CDE consumer assured that what he’s buying is worth his money. Harvey D. is one of the latter.

It’s not that he’s incapable of spectacular work. He just realized early on that solid good work would get him maximum work stability with minimum fuss. And clients loved him for it. Ironically the more difficult clients fawned over him. Harvey just took it with a shrug. He treated both difficult and kind clients alike—with some disdain. After all, work still was just work. At the end of the day, he would just shrug it all off.

Diabetes was the one thing he couldn’t shrug off. And when it finally claimed him, he went with a minimum of fuss.

Harvey and I didn’t share clients, so we rarely worked together. But we did share one thing in common: a sense of dark humor. We cracked jokes about death fearlessly. We were generous with cutting remarks. But while mine had an element of meanness-as-entertainment, Harvey’s was more born out of world-weariness. He accepted that things don’t go as planned, not everything you want will be yours, and that shit does hit the fan. And even in death, Harvey reminded us of that.

After his coffin was wheeled out of the chapel for cremation, his officemates prepared to show a 5-minuter AVP in honor of him. What was supposed to take 5 minutes became almost an hour’s worth of comedy of errors: files refusing to playback; downloading taking long; a missing adaptor; and a file error that occurred at the last 15 seconds of the AVP. All the while people kept saying out loud, “Harvey’s playing a prank on us.”

On the farewell board I wrote, “There are no more job orders where you are, Harvey. Rest in peace, you’ve earned it.”