Ed's Note: We're onto our third week of a Day in the Life of a QuirkStar. This week Carlos chats about being an account manager - sadly the photo only covers the Cape Town crew - but JHB and London will be covered in the coming weeks. Next week Tim's going to chat about what the marketing department does all day - I fall in there so can't wait to read it!

My inbox attacks me every morning. It really does. A malicious entity that I am tempted to present to a couple of priests armed with holy water (kind of like Kat), it comes at me with fangs bared at the crack of dawn, hitting with the impact of a freight-train from a multitude of angles.

Most of the production teams like to focus on one project at a time. It gives them the chance to concentrate and block all of the distractions out. Unfortunately, having a number of projects / sub-projects on the go at the same time means we don’t get that luxury. Between briefing the various teams, reviewing their work, fielding clients’ questions, drafting proposals for potential clients, taking phone-calls, analyzing our performance, meeting with clients, reporting to them on monthly activity, and translating all of the technical terminology into a language understandable by all, we have quite frantic lives.

Cape Town AM's: Santi, Janine, Carlos, Garrick, Tammy, Claire, Smallz (It took a week to get them all in one spot for a photo!)

Whether it’s Claire juggling a hundred phone-calls while trying to dish out the latest proposal or Nic going over our Australian client’s report while en route to a meeting with another client in Monaco to plan our strategy for the next six months, there’ll always be at least one of us who’s looking like we’re on a massive caffeine overdose.

Hand-in-hand with this go all of the inter-departmental laughs and witty (read: purile) humour. It’s no surprise that the account managers' area is the noisiest part of the office – much to the dismay of the other teams! 

In fact, I often wonder just how well loved we are. Whether putting on our best tech-peasant suits and approaching the developers for some novice advice (which is often very sympathetically given) or approaching an exhausted copywriter to tell him that in fact we think the comma on page forty-two of the lovingly prepared copy deck should be done away with, I’m sure that we must work on some nerves. Luckily though, there’s no shortage of advice or help on offer from the teams.

However, I expect that they take their revenge in other forms – which might explain the various Photoshopped images that do the rounds.

Ultimately, our biggest challenge is one of communication – communicating clients’ needs to production, communicating the benefits and limits of various technologies and tactics to clients and communicating areas of responsibility and deliverables to all.

The rest is a mad and frantic blend of strategizing, implementing, reviewing, and driving new business; all to that most fantastic of elements – the deadline.

And as cheesy as it sounds, no two days are the same. Being a jack of all trades every day brings with it a new challenge – be it in the form of shaping a working relationship with a new client, or working together with the production teams to come up with new tactics.

Stressful? Undoubtedly. Boring? Never.