It’s not that I didn’t like what I did. Flight attendant. There was a time when this was a very good way to earn a living and see the world. Plenty of free time, often even at the destinations, and a pretty good salary – nice.

But five years of “coffee or tea” and “chicken or beef” had shown that my brain needed more stimulation than that. There was just one problem: getting into something new. It wasn’t like people were saying, oh wow, you were a waiter in the air, sure, why don’t you join our management.

Two things were on my side though. First of all, I was pretty good at writing, and I had tons of pieces written for magazines to back that up. Secondly, advertising agencies were still very open to hire people coming in from all directions. Especially for copywriting. There were no schools to teach that, and agencies weren’t yet asking for a Master’s degree to fill junior positions.

There was this creative director I had heard of. A guy that took these kinds of people under his wing to see whether they actually had talent. A copywriter kindergarten I called it not much later when I started writing my first little ads for an investment bank. And a brochure. For Cadillac. I remember how Michael looked over my first draft and said: “Hm. Robust. You wrote that the engine is robust. That might be true, but robust is an adjective you use to describe the engine of a Lada, or a Land Rover. Not a Cadillac.”

I liked that. Simply because I liked words, and to use them well. I learned quickly.

I also learned that the guy with the copywriter kindergarten was a person of interest for the creative directors in town. And one day one of them called me. My wife answered the phone as I was sitting on the toilet. She totally misunderstood who was calling, thinking it was a friend with exactly the same name. So she came over to me, and whispered: “It’s Michael, but he sounds really weird…”

That was awkward, to say the least. Especially when I heard: “Hi my name is Michael, but I’m not the Michael you were expecting. I am a creative director at Ogilvy, and I heard that you are looking for a job as copywriter.”

A few minutes later I had a date with Michael. I went, of course, and six weeks later my career as flight attendant was over. I had to find a way to distinguish the Michaels from each other when I talked about either of them. I called the first one “Text-Koch” and the other one “Chef-Koch” (Chef being the German word for Boss).

Getting a job interview while sitting on the toilet. Quite unusual. I don’t think I ever told the Chef-Koch.