Wednesday’s Video: I Couldn’t Fool Eryn a 4th Time!

Well, this is awkward! In today’s video, I brag about about my ability to plan a surprise for someone, and then I fail to surprise my target. I’m going to put the blame on my right-hand woman Eryn, who was also my would-be victim. She didn’t give me much time to work with. Planning a good surprise normally requires weeks of subtle maneuvering, and I had less than 24 hours.

The rush job came about because Eryn broke some big news to me during a one-week stay in New York. Believe it or not, for the past two years, Eryn and her husband have been living near her extended family in Alabama even as she continued working for my New York City-based company. This required a lot of communication, helped along by brief visits to New York. I was hoping that if I held out long enough, Eryn would succumb once more to the siren song of NYC. Alas! Eryn will settle full-time in Alabama instead, newly employed as the graphic designer for fashion company Billy Reid.

Eryn told me on a Thursday, and I had to do her tribute video that Friday because she was heading home on Saturday! We were already scheduled to shoot other YouTube videos that day, and I do think I should get some credit for my firm denial when she asked me, before getting started, “You’re not going to do a video about me, right?”

As I mention in the video, Eryn left me once before, when she snagged another Manhattan-based job in March 2015 — an event that called for a blog post with a different Godfather-related GIF. She was back by November 2016! But she doesn’t get to do that again. It’s not that I wouldn’t want to work with her, because I absolutely would want to, but because I have bigger plans for her. Eryn, should you ever tire of the design world, you know what I expect you to do.

My very best wishes to Eryn as she embarks on this new adventure, and congratulations to the folks at Billy Reid, who don’t even know how lucky they are yet!