NEAT

War broke out between Daniel Hwang, TCS’s owner, and Marcus & David.
All I know is it had something to do with superannuation payments falling behind — I don’t know the full details.
One day, the three of us — Marcus, David, and me — were at Three Monkeys in the city, and they asked if I wanted to join a new company they’d started called NEAT.
Honestly, either way, I was just hired help — working under one guy or another didn’t make much difference to me.
I’d spent way more time with these two than with Daniel, the office stayed the same, the gear stayed the same — a job’s a job, and I couldn’t find a single reason to say no.
After a long, drawn-out dispute, Daniel was gone.
At first, at least for me, things went smoothly — I just kept doing what I’d already been doing. But before even a year had passed, COVID hit.
Total darkness. There was nothing I could do. A promotional-events company with zero events happening had no idea what to do with itself.
We limped along on JobKeeper, and once that ran out, the paychecks stopped coming, and one bleak day after another rolled by.
Work would occasionally seem like it was about to come in, only to get cancelled by another lockdown — we had a whole pile of projects like that.
Around the same time, Miyoung graduated from her Visual Communication program at UTS and finally threw herself into the job hunt she’d been gearing up for — a real design career in Australia.
She made it 99% of the way through the process at Ogilvy, then got a notice that all hiring was frozen because of lockdown.
At an agency that was an Adobe partner, she made it all the way to the fourth round of interviews, only for a second lockdown to cancel that too.
She sent out hundreds of resumes, and almost nobody got back to her.
Miyoung struggled. We got by chipping away little by little at what savings we had.
I’d go into the office and hang out playing badminton with Marcus, and David gave up his apartment and moved into the office to live there.
Should we set up a Korean barbecue pop-up in the window facing the street?
Should we split the office in half and sublet it?
Should we try our hand at some kind of online business, even though we’d never really done that before?
We just kept tossing ideas like that back and forth without ever actually committing to anything.
And so, as time dragged on, we slowly started coming out the other side of COVID, and Miyoung got hired back by that same Adobe-partner agency, ending up working on the 22nd floor of the Adobe building.