Newsletter
#WFH Diaries: Steve and Carla Red of Red Tettemer O'Connell + Partners
With the coronavirus pandemic surging anew, most folks are still working from home. We’re continuing to check in with creative professionals to see how they’re faring. Below, we chat with Steve and Carla Red of Red Tettemer O’Connell + Partners.
Give us one-line bios of yourselves.
Steve Red: Founder of RTO+P, art director by trade, martini drinker by choice, restless by nature.
Carla Red: Managing partner at RTO+P, wine drinker, human dog bed, unreasonably even by nature.
Where are you living right now, and who’s with you?
We’re between Philly and the Catskills with our spouses and business partners (aka, each other), two 100+lb. Pitbull rescues, and an alpha Chihuahua.
What’s your work situation like at the moment, and how is it evolving?
We’re pretty OK with the Zoom/Slack meeting life. We’re both very fine with not getting on a plane every week and love working from home because home can be anywhere. We miss L.A., though, and we really miss the loud, colorful energy of the people we work with.
When do you expect to return to the office?
We extended our WFH option ’til the end of the year (at least), but our office is open to staff as of mid-July. Sometimes, you just want to be at the office.
Describe your socializing strategy.
At work we’ve continued to have our monthly all-agency meetings, which we call The State of the Ranch on Zoom. We all sang REM’s “The End of the World as We Know It” together (it sounded pretty decent on our last meeting), we play Zoom Quizzo and Zoom Fibbage, have Zoom happy hours, the usual…
And, at home, our wedding anniversary was in May, so we hosted anniversary drinks with our neighbors out front.
How are you dealing with childcare, if applicable?
Grown kids, thank the lord.
What are you reading?
The Frederick Douglass speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”, Just Mercy and The Onion.
What are you watching?
The whole Breaking Bad series (never watched when it was on), the third season of Ozark (relentlessly amazing), both seasons of You (yikes), Songland and The Wall (we can’t help ourselves; both are mesmerizing).
What are you listening to?
The Dating Game Killer and How I Built This podcasts, and music all the time. We’re loving our new Apple HomePod speaker things.
How are you staying fit?
Combo of Peloton and Zoom trainer sessions—so many Zoom trainer sessions a week it’s exhausting.
Have you taken up a hobby?
Like many, we’ve gotten better at cooking for ourselves.
An awkward moment since all this started.
Leaning half our unmasked selves out the door to grab mail from our mailbox and getting that look from a neighbor.
An aha! moment since all this started.
Spacebar unmuting on Zoom.
What’s your theory on how this is going to play out?
After four weeks, we stopped trying to predict and started leaning into it.
