Curriculum Vitæ: a working life story, Chapter 18: “Tell me about a time you created a goal and achieved it.”

[Previous chapter] [Ad Agency # 1: April 2013 (four weeks)]

Work took a backseat to Life after we moved to Wales, Prospective Employer. Girlfriend # 3 and I became Freelancers, thus making a mockery of the basis of the financial agreement we'd made with a bank that had allowed us to move to Wales in the first place. One of us would generally be looking after Child # 1 and unpacking boxes or assembling furniture while the other one was Working (with The Terrible Internet) in The Cold Room at the end of the house, which (we were told) used to be a cowshed. Sometimes we’d both be Working, and we’d have to ration The Terrible Internet and let Child # 1 fend for herself on The Horrible Carpet. More often though, neither of us was Working; and we’d be worrying about the dwindling capacity of our meagre Savings (technically Girlfriend # 3’s meagre savings) to support us in our New Life. Sometimes we’d just think “sod it” and drive out to The County Town, or The Border Town, and have lunch with Child # 1 when Everyone Else was Working, enjoying the Time we were lucky enough to be able to share together. Back at home, at lunch in her high chair, Child # 1 would shout “Da! Da-doh!” and excitedly point at a large brown rat that was looking back at us from underneath the 1960s Habitat kitchen cupboard. The loft was full of insects and rodents. There were maggots under The Horrible Carpet. Even the bed we’d brought with us, all the way from The Great Wen, soon became infested with mice.

I secured my first Freelance copywriting Job via a website called People Per Hour, using a slapdash Portfolio cobbled together from various screengrabs of emails I’d written for The DIY Company and the Agency Work Girlfriend # 3 had got for me so that I could afford to buy her a suitable Engagement Ring. My first freelance Job was for The Events Marketing Website—a Start-Up that no longer exists. I charged £20 an hour, and did about fifteen hours, on-and-off, tortuously spread across a couple of weeks. It seemed a Difficult way to make A Living; and I was fortunate that Girlfriend # 3 seemed better able to find Work—and more Work—from her various Agency Contacts.

Our delayed wedding was fast approaching. I’d divided best-man duties among my three brothers, because my best friend by this time was already Girlfriend # 3; and I liked my brothers about equally. So in August I had a four-day stag-do on a narrowboat somewhere north of The Great Wen, organized by my older brother, and attended by all three of my brothers, and no one else. We stopped off at a pub in the north of The Great Wen to which my older brother had invited many of my male Friends. Much fun was had; so much that I fell down the steps at Leighton Buzzard train station on the way back to the narrowboat and sprained my ankle. Things Came To A Head on the boat two days before we were meant to return it. My oldest brother steered it in an unruly and reckless manner past some irate fisherman, and I later urinated into the canal from the stern—having of course checked that no one was watching, Prospective Employer—because the solitary bathroom was occupied. This sequence of events culminated in A Civil War where my older brother and younger brother established de facto control over the operational end of the boat, leaving my oldest brother and I to finish what was left of the wine at the other end. My older brother was furious. So the oldest and I left the boat early to return to The Great Wen in disgrace by train. In doing so, my oldest brother dropped his brand new phone into the canal. (This phone had lasted him about a week; the previous one having suffered a similarly ignominious fate.)

On the following day I reconciled with my older brother, who was regretful of the acrimony that had (perhaps inevitably) arisen as a result of the four of us being confined in close quarters for probably the first (and definitely the last) Time since The Rupture. Alas, the older and oldest brothers did not at that time reconcile; thus A Cold War of words ensued thereafter where one would accuse the other—usually via someone else, but sometimes via their website—of being a psychopath.

Girlfriend # 3 and I were married in August 2012, a week or two after Child # 1’s first birthday, in Cornwall. We’d originally booked The Venue for summer 2011—before we knew we’d be living in West Wales with Child # 1 by the time we finally got married. Thus, the location turned out to be just as inconvenient for us as it was for everyone else we'd invited. There was an inevitable Atmosphere of Palpable Tension between my divorced parents, who we'd decided to sit on a top table alongside us and Girlfriend # 3's parents. Child # 1, seated between us, got tomato sauce on Wife # 1’s wedding dress; and my oldest brother used his best-man speech to tell everyone that my older brother once ate his own faeces as a baby, even though that could only be considered at best tangentially relevant to the events of the day. Anyway: it was a lovely wedding.

(What’s that, Prospective Employer? Oh, yes: I thought it best to refer to my wife as Wife # 1 hereafter. Not because I have another wife now, nor because I’m expecting ever to have another; but because neither “My Wife” nor “The Wife” agrees with the naming convention for romantic partners that I’ve already established for use within this Curriculum Vitæ. And besides, I think she’s a wife of the highest order and Outstanding in Her Field. She’s not just my Wife # 1; but the Wife # 1. Okay? Great.)

We honeymooned in The Isles of Scilly, where Wife # 1 contracted a vomiting bug, and then I contracted a vomiting bug; but Child # 1 was mercifully, if temporarily, quite good at going to sleep when she was supposed to. Everything was expensive on The Isles of Scilly, but also quite beautiful. On the way home Child # 1 contracted the vomiting bug half an hour before we boarded the helicopter, and was still vomiting in it and on it, and all over it; which we tried our best (but ultimately failed) to hide from the other passengers. We returned to The House on the Corner where the boxes were still mostly not unpacked, as weary Man And Wife, and knackered parents—and now having thousands of pounds' worth of wedding debt on top of existing loans, mortgages, etc., we started looking for Work again. Wife # 1 got me some Work rewriting the website of The Tech Agency she was doing strategy stuff for. I edited and ghost-wrote some articles for their Bossman on techy subjects I half-understood; and managed to get a few of them published on The Business Website where I’d had an Interview for a “reporter” Job when Child # 1 was a newborn. 

By October I’d finally been Paid by The Events Marketing Website for the Work I’d done for them over two months ago—although £9.04p less than we’d agreed, for no apparent reason. I secured only the second Freelance writing Job I’d had since summer that did not come via Wife # 1: two days’ Work (with the possibility of a month’s work to follow) for another dubious start-up—The Art Merchant—for which measly stint I inexplicably had to travel to The Great Wen. I charged £250 a day. I don’t remember where I stayed; but probably with my father, who was by then living in The Suburban Flat in the north of the city (with his partner) and working at a Job (that by his account mostly entailed reluctantly firing people) at a nearby university. I was expecting The Art Merchant Job to be cool and fun, but the Workplace had the atmosphere of a Sweatshop. Loads of people packed into one small windowless rented room, where making any non-functional conversation was frowned upon by the bossfolk as Time Thievery. It turned out they’d actually hired four or five copywriters for those two days in order to get us to Compete against each other to be Re-hired for the advertised month’s Work—for which they only needed two of us. I met one of my competing would-be copywriters over a forced march to a decidedly average but admittedly very expensive new popup street food shack during lunch on the first day, and was appalled to discover that despite having no training whatsoever as a writer (much less an MA, like I had) he had nevertheless somehow become a published novelist by the age of 25. (We didn't "click".) The bossfolk were alarmed when I told them I lived in West Wales; but they assured me this wouldn’t affect my chances of being rehired. (Although, of course, they wouldn’t entertain the notion of my Remote Working.) I did my two days, more like four days with the Commute, or one when factoring in the cost of the commute, and returned to West Wales, and heard nothing whatsoever from The Art Merchant for the following weeks. They paid me eventually, and when pressed upon the subject of the advertised job for which I'd been competing they said that my copy was (I quote) “a bit too arty” for an Art Merchant, and not (I quote) “fun/commercial” enough. They also suggested I was A Slow Writer, which I resented; they assured me it was nothing to do with my living in West Wales and only being available for consecutive three-day stretches due to shared Childcare Commitments with Wife # 1: “We are very flexible and also supportive of childcare responsibility sharing” they insisted. (But not Flexible enough to entertain such a thing as Remote Working, Prospective Employer.) That start-up still exists; at least inasmuch as its brand is still in use, albeit with an entirely different Business Model. And although I didn’t enjoy Working there, and they didn’t enjoy me Working there, the Job remained on my Freelancer CV for years afterwards. So I regretfully bequeath to you, Prospective Employer, my dim and unfond memories of it.

With my woeful record in finding Freelance Work—and Wife # 1’s success in the same—I settled in to my de facto role as Primary Childcarer and DIY amateur. Wife # 1 might have had to breastfeed Child # 1 in-between Conference Calls—or even during them, if the laptop camera was switched off—but all other Parental Duties could be undertaken satisfactorily by me. I applied for plenty of Jobs, but Prospective Employers seemed to want me to be living in The Great Wen in order to do those Jobs; which was exactly what I didn’t want. I plugged away at The Wine Websites Job, which was fun, but—only ever yielding about £100 a month—never seriously threatened to contribute significantly to our combined income, much less to Pay Off our Enormous Mortgage. Before I was offered Ad Agency Job # 1 (my first significantly meaty Freelance Role, to which this section serves as a preamble) only two other matters of any Professional relevance occurred. One was that I had an Article published in The Guardian. And the other was that, on the fourth attempt, I finally passed my Driving Test. And since both were at least tangentially related to Work, I’ll deal with them before I finally come on to the first of my substantial Freelance Contract Roles.

The Guardian Article

By the time I was Freelancing, and had moved to The House on The Corner in West Wales, I was still maintaining no fewer than four Blogs, so as to continue to Practise Writing in case anybody ever decided that they wanted to Pay me to do it. I was still composing poems and had enjoyed some very minor success at that, which I will detail at the appropriate juncture. I was still reviewing books, but not finding as much Time to read them. I was still writing about wine, but mostly for The Wine Websites. And I still had my Personal Blog, which I still mostly used to complain about Other People’s Writing—especially if they were being Paid for it, because I was Jealous.  

In January 2013 I joined The Content Mill, which purported to offer copywriters Freelance Work from Clients in exchange for A Cut. The third or fourth such website I’d joined, actually. And this one would only differ in that the Jobs therein seemed so shonky and Paid such shockingly low Rates (a penny per word, and less!) that I felt the need to take Time out of my Tuesday to Blog about it. The copywriting community on Twitter, I found, already had strong opinions about The Content Mill; not least the guy from the newly founded Industry Body For Copywriters, who we’ll call Clarence. My blogpost drew much more attention than any similar ones I’d written before—complaining about recruiters, billboards, TV adverts, signposts, etc.—especially after the CEO of The Content Mill (who we’ll call Klaus) left a comment threatening Legal Action unless I removed the name of one of his clients from the blog post I'd published about his website. Displaying, I admit, relatively rare Ingenuity, I spotted the Potential for a balanced and thought-provoking Newspaper Article on the topic; which might simultaneously bemoan my status as a Struggling Freelancer and advertise my copywriting services to anyone who might be reading it. This might even make me some Money, I supposed; if I could Pitch it to a proper Publisher. I’d never before Pitched an Article to a Newspaper or Website or whatever, because I didn’t do the “feature-writing” module on The MA Course so I had no idea how to go about it. But I had no Work on so I decided to Wing It. I pitched it to The Guardian, because that was the Newspaper I used to read, back when I had Time for such things—and because they’d already published work by two of my brothers. My younger brother, fresh out of Pennycomequick University College, had his Ceefax-inspired digital CV featured on The Guardian website back in August 2011; and my oldest brother wrote some blogs about The Music Industry for them in 2007, about a year after his Debut Album received a brief, three-out-of-five star Review on their Website. I no longer had the same last name as either of those brothers, mind you; so I could hardly hope for any Nepotism or Reflected Glory to work in my favour. To my surprise though, the editor of The Guardian Website’s Work Blog commissioned my Article. And, fortunately for me, both Klaus and Clarence were happy to be Interviewed by email for it. I also interviewed “Patrick” who’d invited me to Freelance for The Language Consultancy he Worked at (but who had yet to actually send me any Work) and I sourced an anonymous contribution from a Jobbing Writer who used The Content Mill and was willing to vouch for its viability as a Supplementary Income Stream, thus providing a counterbalance to my own experience of the website.

At over 600 words, the above summary of the article I wrote for The Guardian in 2013 is almost as long as the Article itself, once I’d edited it down. So I’ll conclude by saying that They published it, it received numerous angry comments from copywriters (many of whom were equally angry that I’d turned the Contentious Issue that many of them had already written about on their own personal blogs into a source of Income), and a friend from sixth form—who I knew had worked at The Guardian for a while—informed me via Facebook that day that my Article had been the subject of a brief but fevered discussion in that morning’s Editorial Meeting because nobody had realized it would be such a Contentious Issue, or that Klaus from The Content Mill was in the habit of threatening to sue people. The implication being that if the commissioning editor had actually read all of my Pitch email, instead of merely skimming it, she’d never have commissioned my Article in the first place.

I was Paid £1.46 less than my copywriting Day Rate (then £250). And the Article had taken me the better part of two days to Produce. So I decided not to make a Habit of Pitching to Newspapers in future.

The Driving Test

I already mentioned that I’d started learning to drive on the weekends in The Harbour Town, while I was working at The DIY Company, when Girlfriend # 3 was pregnant with Child # 1. But I didn’t mention that I failed my test three times.

My driving instructor was a clean-shaven ex-policeman with a blow-dried mane of silver hair, who’d taken Early Retirement from The Force because of “the politics”. He would frequently say “Helloooooo!” when we passed female joggers. He’d start sentences with “You watch Top Gear, right? Course you do, everyone watches Top Gear…” And he looked pretty much exactly like a genetic concoction of the three then-presenters of that show, should such a thing have been scientifically possible. He once told me an anecdote about snapping a kid’s skateboard in half for being cheeky to him when he was a policeman. I could tell he expected me to find this funny, but I'm not sure how well I faked amusement, or hid my disgust. He wasn’t really my kind of guy, Prospective Employer; but, to be fair, he wasn’t A Bad Driving Instructor either. Traffic in The Haven Town at mid-morning on weekends wasn’t terrible. But the roads outside The Historic Centre were a chaotic mess of unplanned 20th-century sprawl; a vain attempt to marry the population explosion in Southern England with the American dream of asphalt, steel and Libertarianism. I’d been in numerous Road Traffic Accidents over the years, as both passenger and pedestrian, and the Cautious approach I took to driving as a result had no place on the aggro-fuelled A-roads of Southern England—where a right turn at a roundabout might require acceleration up to 75mph just to shove one’s vehicle into the right-hand lane of a jam-packed dual-carriageway. There were phrases like “making progress” and “undue hesitation” which carried little weight in my mind set against “thundering juggernaut” and “orphaned foetus”. 

I had to take Time off from my Job to sit The Driving Tests. The First One was going quite well, I thought. And the examiner wasn’t too bad. But then I repeatedly failed to reverse park (which I had been managing just fine in my lessons) on a road with plenty of spaces where I could easily have parked without reversing. 

In the second test I was shouted at by The Examiner for waiting too long at a junction, where the constant flow of school-run traffic combined with the blinding spring-morning sun meant that I couldn’t possibly pull out across the traffic without at least a small chance of hitting a cyclist or a mother pushing a pram. The Examiner had already told me off once for opening the car door before he’d asked me to; so my leg had been physically shaking from the moment I got in t the driver’s seat. This wasn’t something that happened in lessons, nor when I was driving with Girlfriend # 3; so I failed to see how such behaviour represented the ordinary conditions of driving, as opposed to my having been abducted at gunpoint by a septuagenarian sadist. The Examiner ended up grabbing the steering wheel while I was navigating a roundabout because I couldn’t see the faded road markings in the low morning sun and I'd been momentarily drifting across into another lane. Whether the resulting swerve really made things safer for us or the other road users, I couldn't say; but there was barely an unmarked box on my test failure certificate that day! 

I don’t even remember my third test, except that The Examiner was female, but no less horrible than The Second One had been. When I got back to The Tall House in The Gated Community, heavily pregnant Girlfriend # 3 was waiting with a card to congratulate me. I got my bag and headed straight for the train station for work, unable to stem my wretched tears of exasperation. I hated myself. I was useless. Why couldn’t I even do the basic things that other adults could do? What was I even for? (Not driving, apparently.)

On the night that Girlfriend # 3 was in Labour in The Haven Town Hospital, I had no trouble whatsoever reverse parking on the wrong side of a crowded culdesac at 2am—because there was no foreign body in the passenger seat, brandishing a clipboard. By the time we moved to The House on The Corner in West Wales I still hadn’t passed my test. And even though there was nothing but an Iron Age ringfort within walking distance, I didn’t drive much at all for the first six months. But Wife # 1 insisted that if we were going to Live Rurally—especially if I wasn’t getting much Freelance Work—I would have to look after Child # 1, and in order to do that to a satisfactorily modern standard, I’d have to be able to drive. I couldn’t argue with that. So I started taking lessons again, down in The Dockyard Town. And because The Landsker County didn’t suffer the same Population Density as Southern England, driving there was easy by comparison. I booked a Fourth Test as soon as I was able. My new instructor was nice. A normal, helpful, well-meaning guy. He never admitted to abusing any positions of power he’d been in, nor risked making passing women feel uncomfortable in order to prove his masculinity to either himself or me, nor even talked about Top Gear.

My fourth Test Examiner was characteristically stern, but Welsh this time. I don’t know where they find these people; but most seem to think the primary purpose of their Job is to put people at their unease. Nevertheless, The Dockyard Town at mid-morning on a Tuesday was a very different place to The Haven Town during a school-run. There was barely anything else on the roads, and a blind pig could probably have passed a Driving Test that morning. I was still Nervous though, and my leg still shook for at least half of the journey. Returning to The Centre, The Examiner informed me in a not-even-vaguely congratulatory manner that I’d passed. I thanked him—I’m not sure what for; it was me that drove—and he asked me where my surname came from. I told him I’d made it up when I got married, and that my birth surname had been Polish, from my Polish grandfather.

“We owe a lot to the Poles,” he said, as he handed me my certificate. 

But he didn’t say how much. 

And he didn’t offer to Pay me anything.

The role

My first In-House Agency Job came from that most unexpected source: an unsolicited message from a headhunter on LinkedIn. He seemed like A Nice Guy, and even though the Job required being in The Great Wen for a month—which wasn’t something I wanted to make a habit of—the day rate of £260 and the extra weight on me Freelance CV made it seem just about worthwhile.

It was technically more Social Media Community Management than Creative Copywriting. I’d be writing “in character” as the mascot of a new hot-chocolate brand, spun off from an existing chocolate bar. The mascot was a velvet-suited guru/lothario character conceived by a pair of young Creatives. The product’s USP was, apparently, the unmatched frothiness of the drink. There was a short YouTube ad featuring The Character (complete with hair and beard made out of froth) grooving around his (small-P) play-boy mansion and turning various things into froth, with accompanying modish “screaming goat” sound effects. I think The Character was supposed to be Italian, from the ’70s. But such details were never really specified. I doubt there was a thoroughly conceived backstory to the character, much less a “bible”. It was pretty low-budget stuff, and I inferred that The Creatives were keener on the concept than Ad Agency # 1, and that Ad Agency # 1 in turn were keener on it than the Client was. The ad was only airing on TV once—during the first episode of Series 7 of “Britain’s Got Talent”—and the rest was all online: YouTube ads, and a four-week “takeover” of the chocolate bar’s Social Media profiles.

I sent The Creatives some sample tweets based on their “brief” and they liked them. So I was invited to occupy a vacant spot on a desk cluster in The Agency’s Office in The Great Wen that April, so I could tweet, post Facebook updates, and respond to comments on Facebook from there. I even provided sample responses to what I imagined people might say to The Character online after seeing the ad. These covered a variety of moods, including: enthusiastic, confused, sarcastic, confrontational, abusive, and sexually inappropriate—all of which would later manifest themselves in real comments made by Customers online. (Often several moods at once.)

I stayed with my father and Commuted to Work on the tube, which was fine. But I missed Wife # 1 and Child # 1. Ad Agency # 1 was A Miserable Workplace, even though the Work itself was quite fun. My Colleagues all had headphones in, and kept abruptly getting up and leaving The Office without saying anything to anyone else about where or why they were going. A couple of them did so For Good in the short Time I was there; and it was Rumoured that this wasn’t a great Time to be at that particular Agency, though I never learnt why. If you don’t know Agencies, Prospective Employer—and you’ve never seen “Mad Men”—The Account People act as a sort of buffer between The Creatives (and Freelancers like me) and The Clients who Pay The Agency. The account guy I mostly dealt with was an almost impressively unmemorable northern male who liked football, lager, and not being made to think. Anything I produced that spoke to the guru/lothario nature of The Character he called “weird” and “something only Shoreditch wankers will get”. He tried to make me remove anything based on The Character’s character and replace it with generic “froth” or “hot chocolate” related sales platitudes that could have been written by a bot. The Creatives (busy as they were with further hairbrained schemes) trusted me and fought my cause, at least on the rare occasions their input was sought. The senior account woman too, an overworked American, seemed happy just to leave me to it. But The Man One had to justify his Job somehow, and we were thus perpetually At Loggerheads unless he was busy making something else shit on behalf of some other brand, or unaccountably absent.

The one aspect of the Job that I was vaguely uncomfortable with was The Burner Phone with which I was meant to answer text-messages from Customers who’d seen the ad. The Creatives thought it would be funny to put a phone number in the ad, for people to dial. But the ad didn’t specify what the number was for or what might be expected to happen in the event of it being used, because nobody had thought that far ahead. There were plenty of phone-calls—which I didn’t answer obviously; because I couldn’t do an Italian accent, and because it would have been Beyond My Brief. But I was instructed to listen to all of the messages (mostly Customers expecting free hot chocolate, but also some... Pretty Weird Stuff) and then to respond in text form, encouraging Customers to “froth out” and also to buy hot chocolate, in as Creative a manner as I was able. I’m sure there were Safeguarding Issues around Customers of unknown ages contacting an unknown and unvetted Agency Freelancer via a private medium; but nobody seemed to care about that as long as I kept replying to the messages. They probably just chucked the phone in the bin at the end of April and billed The Client for it. 

There was no need for me to be in The Office (let alone Another Country) in order to do that job. I barely spoke to Colleagues, day-to-day, and the creative directors on my desk cluster (who weren’t even working on the same Account as me) only acknowledged me once—to ask me whether I knew a word for “someone who keeps leaving and re-joining Facebook”. I didn’t, but I agreed that there probably should be a word for that.

Despite the suboptimal vibe of the Job, the weeks slipped by smoothly in a gooey (yes, even frothy) cascade of sugary social-media based data-waste. "Assets" arrived from the creatives. I posted them and adlibbed responses to the responses they elicited from the sort of people who talk to fast-moving consumer goods brands online. Occasionally I was invited to provide "creative copy"; notably a spoof horoscope in which I was heroically able to shoehorn in the phrase "waxing Uranus"; which I'm not even sure makes astronomical (or astrological) sense. We finalized the month-long "takeover" with a competition to win the character's slippers (as worn in the ad). I had the bright idea (stolen, I think, from Rumpelstiltskin) that the competitive aspect would involve guessing the character's real name. Obviously it didn't have a real name; and if we thought of one, the chances of anybody correctly guessing it would be close to zero. So we agreed on the last day to pick whichever proposed "name" sounded at once plausible, inoffensive, and not so normal as to be off-brand. None of us bothered to Google the chosen name, and it turned out to be the real name of a semi-famous YouTuber that none of us had heard of. Cue a certain degree of confusion among the online folk who had been following the product launch, the ad, the competition, etc. The YouTuber in question suddenly found himself fielding somewhat leftfield questions about his professional involvement with a hot drinks brand... Whatever: not our mess to clean up; our contracted time on the account was soon to be over. Someone put the slippers in a jiffy bag and went to the post office. I turned the mobile phone off and put it back in the drawer.

For the one-night-only TV airing of the ad, I was Paid Overtime to watch “Britain’s Got Talent” for the first (and thus far only) Time in my Life, and to deal with the anticipated ensuing explosion of Brand Interest on Social Media. I got good and drunk in advance and challenged myself to tweet as much as was physically possible. I tweeted every Potential Customer that mentioned the Ad, at a rate of about 8 tweets per minute (AKA: TPM) and was consequently banned by Twitter for 24 hours for reaching the “maximum number of tweets allowed in one day”; which I’m proud to say has never happened to anyone else I know. The Job drew to a close, I screen-grabbed some “sentiment analysis” for the Client Reports. The Creatives gave me their Contact Details in case I wanted to Work with them again. (On what? When? How?) There was vague talk from the senior Accounts person about possible future Work From Home, but I took that with a pinch of salt.

I don’t want to drag this out as if it was a Full-Time Job I did for six months, Prospective Employer. But for the sake of consistency in formatting:

Good Job or Bad Job?

Solidarity was pretty close to zero for this Job. I didn’t like the main Account guy and he didn’t like me (or his Job, or the city he'd chosen to live in, as far as I could tell); I barely ever spoke to the few nice people I met there, and it was a bit of a pain in the neck getting Paid, as usual. Whether or not there’s Dignity in pretending to be a fictional Italian hot-chocolate monster from the 1970s on Social Media is very much in the eye of the beholder, Prospective Employer; but it was a better use of my talents many of the Jobs I’ve done over the years. And the deeper I’d got into the World of Digital Marketing, the harder it got for me to work out whether I’d produced anything at all through my Work. I was increasingly of the opinion that a certain degree of Nihilism might be necessary in order to get to the end of The Working Day. It wasn’t that I was worried I’d done nothing; the 24-hour suspension from Twitter for overtweeting spoke for itself. And it wasn’t that I was worried about Selling My Soul or anything like that. (I don’t believe in souls; or rather, I rarely have a personal use for the word or the concept.) It was more that I was increasingly concerned that I was doing Fake Work. Work that existed only because a Job needed to exist, in order for People Like Me to be Employed, and to be able to feed and clothe themselves. Not Work that needed to exist for any other reason. There’s a book called “The Scheme for Full Employment” by Magnus Mills, which I’d read at university, in which a self-perpetuating industry of vans driving parts of vans around to depots is dreamt up to ensure people are never short of Work. And I couldn’t help thinking that paying people to manage social media profiles was somehow similar, but also somehow worse.

A quick search of my contemporary Twitter posts in a failed attempt to source a suitable image to accompany this chapter as posted on my blog reveals that, while I was working in London that April, I spent much of my downtime crowd-funding my debut poetry book via Kickstarter; I also managed to see The Indelicates performing live (presumably promoting their excellent fourth album, Diseases of England); and, because it's always good to have a third thing in a list of things, former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died.

I must have lost a bit of weight over that past winter, because one afternoon while I was on my way to or from Oxford Street at lunchtime, my rose-gold wedding ring slipped from my finger, never to be recovered. I’d be on the fence otherwise; but for that reason if no other I was always going to say that Ad Agency # 1 Job was A Bad Job.

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