Don't Cry for my Emails, Ivor Andrew

Dearly beloved chat bots, spider bots, porn bots, scraper bots and spam bots,

We are here today to give the woman who is writing this article about herself in the third person some validation.

Before we start, I’d like to make one thing clear: Audra is not dead. This isn’t, like, a weird therapy exercise we were all forced to do after she fell into a silo full of corn never to be heard from again.

Now that we’ve established that she’s very much alive and hating it, let’s get this eulogy started.

Audra was originally hired as an admin and she was definitely okay at her job. A couple of months in, her bosses thought, “Wow, she can really write some words, she should be a full-time copywriter.” Normal words, dry words, weird words and probably other kinds of words. She could write them all! A true modern woman!

Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of room to be weird in B2B marketing. What’s a girl to do when it’s always “complex problems” this and “custom solutions” that? The answer was clear: internal communication was fair game until someone told her to stop. 

Friends, they never told her to stop.  

The ask was simple. At the end of each month, Audra was to email the Ivor Andrew staff with two reminders: 1) enter your time sheets, and 2) close your monthly tasks.

She definitely did that. But she also did—how do I put this nicely—a whole lot more than that?

I can’t say whether she made a conscious decision to start making the emails weird or if it was just as Limp Bizkit famously says, "one of those days."

Regardless, it started with a fixation on making the monthly emails about Vin Diesel movies. Why? Couldn’t tell you. Even though, again, Audra is the one writing this and speaking in both first and third person. Getting obsessed with something in particular for months on end is just one of those things I do. She does. We do.

Now, if we showed you every weird reminder email she’s written, this article would literally be 20 pages long, so we’re just going to stick with the greatest hits. But first, we’ll start where it makes the most sense: the initial deviation from normal emails, three months into her employment at Ivor Andrew.

For the next few months, she kept taking the synopsis of different Vin Diesel movies and replacing parts to make them about closing tasks and timesheets. A little lazy, some might say. Definitely not the best use of her skills.  

But we eventually ended up here:

No one told her to stop after this, so you could say that things escalated. The next email might seem a little more tame, but she included a personal anecdote in this one. That’s a slippery slope right there, my friends. I see some of you nodding. You know.

And yes, we are skipping literally three months of Vin Diesel-themed emails.

Now, some might say that Audra took the pandemic and quarantine well (she does, she honestly says this sometimes), but honestly, the following emails say otherwise. We’ll resume our trip down memory lane in May of 2020, when Khloe Kardashian’s weirdly edited photos were all the rage in some corners of the internet.

Wow, topical! At least it wasn’t about Vin Diesel. We were all glad to move on from Vin Diesel. Or were we? 

Listen up folks, I don’t know what’s going on with this one and neither did anyone else. No one responded to this email, but they did politely ignore it instead of saying, “why are you like this?”

So there’s that, I guess.

I’ll let you digest that one for a minute. I don’t know what else to tell you besides that she likes spooky stuff and cryptids. The next one is back to normal form, and by “normal form” I mean that it was inspired by a meme she hasn’t stopped thinking about for years. If you know about ol’ Hickory Ham Mike, then you know.

I’m sure that all of her co-workers were like, “I don’t know who Hickory Ham Mike is but I love a good ham!” and were all very excited about the shift in topic. Everyone in the midwest has an advanced degree in Ham and loves to talk about them, if you’re not from around here.

But let’s jump to May of 2021--to the email that her creative director simply responded to with, “do we have an office drug policy?” 

I would like to point out that she was not on any drugs when she wrote about the trials and tribulations of Jimmy B, but I can understand why someone would think so.

This is getting long, but that’s SO Audra, isn’t it? We’re going to end with something that is also SO Audra: a barrage of fun insults! After all, her strongest talent isn’t writing. It’s tricking people into liking her even though her social comfort zone is abrasive and kind of mean.

It’s called being an onion, just like Shrek. 

Anyway, it seems fitting to end this eulogy (another reminder: Audra is not dead, very much alive!) with her final end-of-the-month email. The one she considers to be her masterpiece, but if you think Jimmy B is her masterpiece she’ll accept that as well. 

She’ll see you in the words she writes for work. Or maybe later, depending on who you are. If you’re her friend or coworker, you’re going to see her later whether you want to or not!