My dangerous years

I once rated myself a 12 out of 10 in PageMaker during an interview.

I was 22. I meant it.

That’s what it felt like to be young and technically fluent in the 90s. Companies that had spent years building production workflows around specialized expertise suddenly looked at kids with Macs as if we were the future.

And honestly? We kind of were.

I didn’t understand how fast everything was about to move.

My first post-college job was making $10 an hour doing desktop publishing at Alphagraphics. But by then I had already fallen hard for advertising and graphic design somewhere between the Mac lab, production deadlines, and an obsession with thirtysomething that probably bordered on unhealthy.

Within a year, I was in a 12-person agency in Secaucus, NJ producing video games, experimenting with one of the first video capture cards made for Mac, troubleshooting networks, and trying to figure out what “interactive” even meant because suddenly every client was asking about it.

And the best part? Nobody really knew what they were doing.

Desktop publishing became digital production became multimedia. One month you were laying out brochures. The next month, you were producing video on a computer and building games in Macromedia Director while clients nodded along, pretending they understood what you were showing them.

One of those games was basically a branded version of Pole Position, except you were driving through a patient with high cholesterol and shooting statins at clogged arteries. We set it up on a trade show floor.

It was ridiculous.

It was also pretty badass.

Honestly, half the time we were pretending to know what we were doing.

Every few months, some new technology showed up, and somebody had to figure it out. Usually, that somebody was me.

I became the person who fixed the Macs, troubleshot the network, figured out software upgrades, experimented with multimedia tools, and learned whatever came next because the next thing was always arriving before you had fully learned the last one.

“How hard could it be?” turned out to be a surprisingly effective career strategy.

Then I landed at Thomas G. Ferguson Associates in Parsippany, one of the most admired pharmaceutical advertising agencies in Northern New Jersey. Before consolidation, the area was packed with pharma agencies competing for launches, pitches, and prestige. It was an incredible place to learn advertising because everything mattered, and everybody was trying to stay ahead of what was coming next.

And what was coming next was digital production.

The work escalated fast. Building digital production studios. Transitioning departments into digital prepress. Producing multimedia presentations. Becoming the roadie for an $18,000 digital projector because somebody had to drag this fragile alien machine from pitch to pitch without destroying it.

That was an actual responsibility I had.

And somehow all of this was happening inside pharma, which did not move fast because it dealt in life and death. Pharma moved carefully. But even there, the ground was shifting underneath everybody.

Agencies that had spent decades marketing almost exclusively to doctors and scientists were suddenly trying to figure out how to speak directly to consumers. Clients wanted “interactive” before anybody fully knew what that meant. The web was arriving. Multimedia was arriving. Digital production was replacing traditional processes almost in real time.

And sometimes I got to work on things that literally changed the world. I worked on the launch and marketing of Invirase, the first protease inhibitor. A few years earlier, my uncle had died of AIDS. Suddenly, there was a drug that could fundamentally change the trajectory of the disease.

I was a tiny part of that launch.

I don’t think I stopped long enough to process what that meant emotionally because everything was moving so fast already.

That’s the thing I keep coming back to while writing this now. When you’re inside transformation, you do not stand outside of it analyzing what it means. You just keep moving because every few months, the technology changes, the expectations change, the work changes, and your job changes with it.

And if you’re young enough, curious enough, and ambitious enough, it feels incredible.

I had never felt more capable in my career. Nobody really had more expertise than anyone else yet. The people who moved fastest were the people willing to be wrong, try something, learn publicly, and move on. I loved every single minute of it.

And writing this now, I realize something that genuinely never occurred to me back then.

The paste-up artists. The typesetters. The production people who had spent decades mastering those systems. They watched people like me walk in and change everything almost overnight.

I never thought of myself as dangerous.

I was excited. Curious. Completely energized by all of it. I thought I was learning new tools and building a career.

I didn’t realize I was also the person walking into the room, making other people wonder if their expertise still mattered.

And maybe that’s why the AI conversation feels so familiar to me now.

Because I know exactly who the disruptor is.

I used to be her.