Curriculum Vitæ: a working life story, Chapter 22: “Tell me about a time you had to persuade someone.”

[Previous chapter] [The Language Consultancy: 2013 – 2014 (odd jobs)]

There were a number of other Agencies I worked for remotely over the early-to-mid years of my Freelance Career, Prospective Employer. And few of these Jobs had sufficient thematic or chronological coherence to allow me to collect them into Chapters for this Curriculum Vitæ, or even to call them “Jobs”; let alone sufficient interest in terms of their influence over my Personal and Professional Development to allow me to write about them in any detail. I make an exception for The Language Consultancy, because even though I did something shy of a month’s worth of Full-Time Work for them over two years, the sporadic Jobs they sent my way might help to fill in the Gaps in that period of my Career.

My awareness of the existence of The Language Consultancy went all the way back to The MA Course, when they offered an internship in The Great Wen to whichever member of The MA Course was able to impress them most with a CV and Portfolio of Work. They told me in their telephone-based feedback that my Portfolio was okay, but that I’d misspelt the word “restaurant” on my CV when detailing The Kitchen Porter Job I did to save up money for The TEFL Course in The City of a Hundred Spires. (What can I say? I never claimed to be French.)

Six years later—after I’d moved to The Great Wen, left it again, and was quite literally just about to go freelance—I got a direct (i.e. private) message on Twitter from someone called Patrick who worked for The Language Consultancy, saying he liked my tweets (bit weird, I thought) and asking me if I wanted to take their “Freelancers’ Test”. So I thanked him and said I did. He set me up with their In-House Recruiter, who I noticed used the word “pop” a lot in place of numerous more specific verbs. I did the test, which involved rewriting two chunks of Corporate Guff in a more Fun and Accessible Tone of Voice, and popped it back to them. The Recruiter said they’d like to discuss my Work (and how I could make it “pop” more) and invited me to The Great Wen to meet one of The Writing Team. She told me to “pop” her an email to confirm, and “pop” her a CV. I was beginning to suspect that The Language Consultancy staff were either browbeaten into replacing as many verbs as possible with “pop” by their own Tone of Voice Stazi, or that they had a running office In-Joke about doing so. (I once counted five uses of the verb “pop” in one really rather short email.)

The timing was inconvenient for me, as I was literally about to move to West Wales. So I moved to West Wales, and then went to The Great Wen to meet them. I wasn’t sure whether to be Nervous or not—okay, perhaps more accurately, I wasn’t sure how Nervous to be—because this wasn’t a Job interview as such; I already had a Job: I was a Freelance Writer. But I didn’t yet have any Freelance Work, and this was my first Big Opportunity (this being summer 2012, before I'd got married, and just after I’d left The DIY Company and moved house). The woman who Interviewed me was intelligent and intimidating—but also quite nice. I couldn’t help thinking the Meeting could have been done over the phone, or ideally by email, or even more ideally (yes, I know) not at all. But it wasn’t their fault that their Office was in The Great Wen and that everyone with an Office in The Great Wen insists that everybody else who ever Works for them must at least temporarily and ideally permanently share their Misery by also being in it. That was just the way things were/are.

I thanked them, and left, and went back to West Wales on the train, changing in Newport, and redid the part of the test they wanted me to redo, and “popped” it back in their general direction them via email. They eventually confirmed that they were happy with it. So I sent them my day-rate (£250) and I waited eagerly for The Language Consultancy Freelance Work to come rolling in—while doing odd Jobs for The Wine Website, The Events Marketing Website, and The Art Merchant, and looking after Child # 1. But no work came. Four months later, having spent half a day on two drafts of The Test and a couple of days and about a hundred quid getting to and from The Great Wen, I was approaching Miffed. So I sent the Twitter guy (Patrick) an email, to ask him was I:

a) not quite up to scratch

b) too expensive

c) not needed at the moment

d) just an awful person, generally, or

e) other

He apologized, and said it was c). Determined to get something back for the Time and Money I’d put in, I was mildly mollified when Patrick agreed to give me a few quotes for The Guardian Article I wrote in February 2013. (Not sure if you remember that, Prospective Employer? I had an article in The Guardian once. Apparently I can't stress that enough.) And at long last, in May of that year—the month after I returned from The Great Wen after my stint at Agency # 1—my first brief from The Language Consultancy arrived in my inbox.

The role

I worked on about 12 little Jobs for The Language Consultancy over the couple of years they sent Work my way. There were others I missed out on by answering emails too late, or because I was busy looking after Child # 1, or Child # 2—and, on one occasion because I decided to go and pick magic-mushrooms on a hill in the north of The Landsker County instead. (I never actually ate them, Prospective Employer. It was just Research.)

The majority of the Work that came my way in the first year was “naming” work. The Naming of Brands is a specialist subset of Brand Copywriting that I’d had brief theoretical experience of on The MA Course, and practical experience of when I spent a week in The City by the Bridge doing Unpaid Labour for a Branding Agency as part of the aforementioned Course. I’d also had real-life experience of (sur-)Naming myself and Wife # 1, and had a more-or-less-equal hand in the Naming of Children # 1 and 2. I’d also named my poetry company Doubtist Books. The Language Consultanc y had a structured approach to Naming that involved a thorough briefing document for the Client to fill in and pop back; Freelancers like me were also encouraged to pop emails back and forth to The In-House Writing Team in The Great Wen to Crowdsource suggestions in a sort of Remote Brainstorm. I worked on Naming Projects of this kind for telecoms sub-brands and fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) brands: basically the types of Company that were already on my CV when The Labour Dividers at The Language Consultancy got hold of It and, by extension, Me. There was one Job for a “disruptive bank” (no, me neither); but that was cancelled halfway through the first day’s Work because the disruptive bank was so disruptive that it abruptly Ceased To Exist. According to my records, I never billed for that half a day.

There were also a few packaging-copy briefs and slogans for soap and shampoo brands; some of which were specifically for the Southeast Asian market, despite being written in English. I was Working on one particularly pungent-sounding soap product (“alive with sweet floral notes from the Black Magic Rose”—bleurgh!) while on Holiday in Tenerife; and thus I missed most of Child # 1’s third birthday and never saw anything much outside our rented holiday apartment while in The Canary Islands, to which I have never yet returned. (Actually, if I'm being completely honest, I did accompany the rest of Wife # 1's family to a water park, where I went down one slide before Child # 1 overheated and was sick, and we had to take her back to the apartment.)

A few years in, three things happened in the following order, and one or all or none of them brought about the end of my relatively brief period as a Freelancer for The Language Consultancy:

1. An Admin Person at The Language Consultancy accidentally copied me in on an email to which a massive Excel spreadsheet was attached, featuring the Names and Day Rates of all of their Freelancers. It turned out I was among the cheapest; although, in fairness, some of those that were significantly more expensive were doing In-House training Work; in which I had no interest. I responded to the email (directly to The Admin Person, not CCing anyone else in) suggesting that perhaps the email wasn’t meant for me. I got no reply.
   

2. I upped my rate from £250 a day to £275. Partly in response to seeing that at least two other freelancers were charging £300 a day for doing similar Work to me—though admittedly I’d no way of knowing whether they were better at it. But also because £275 was how much I was charging The Agencies I worked for via Wife # 1, and they never seemed to think it extortionate; even though at least one of them was based in The Fairy Place, and not in The Great Wen.
   

3. I accepted a slightly more substantial brief than any I’d worked on before. A series of internal corporate articles for a blended whisky brand (Alcohol: another thing already on my CV; insert obvious joke here). Unlike the other briefs I’d had from The Language Consultancy, this one was incredibly shonky and full of holes. I voiced my concerns early on to The Production Person, and she assured me that more information would be forthcoming; but it never came. Forth. And because it was at least four days’ work—i.e. £1,100—and I didn’t have anything else on for the rest of 2014, I didn’t dare turn it down. So I dove in. I did my best. It was a mess, and Staff at the Client’s Office kept rewriting bits before forwarding it to other Stakeholders, so it inevitably ended up much worse. The schedule for rewrites overran; I went into days I’d booked out to Work (with Wife # 1 taking over Childcare) and had no Work to do. When they finally came back asking that I do two more days, I’d have been happy to; but Wife # 1 was then scheduled to be Working, and I had no other Childcare options. I had a Feedback Call with Patrick (who I hadn’t worked with for many months by this point) and he said The Client had been unhappy with my Work. I told him I wasn’t surprised, because I wasn’t happy with it; because they’d never briefed me properly, so I had to guess what I was supposed to be writing based on little more than a couple of adjectives. I apologized, but... I was beyond the Time in my Professional Life where I was going to admit culpability for a fuck-up I’d both foreseen and flagged up. I don’t know who if anyone threw me under which bus, Prospective Employer. But they’ve not Paid me for anything since.

Good Job or Bad Job?

The Language Consultancy, basically a Copywriting Agency, whatever it chose to call itself, was much like other Agencies I’d worked for remotely, which I've not dedicated a chapter of this CV to. It was only the semi-regular Nature of the Work that made it feel like an actual CV-worthy Job, albeit an “on-and-off” gig more than a Part-Time Job. Patrick seemed nice. So did everyone there that I worked with—as much as I could tell from emails and conversations on the phone. But there was nothing even approaching Solidarity in my very distant relationship with the Team. And I felt I’d been pretty neatly Scapegoated over The Whisky Brand Work, which ought never to have progressed in the absence of a clear brief according to the agency's own procedural practice.

Conversely, I felt that there was Dignity inherent in the old-school Copywriting Work of dreaming up Product Names and Slogans, and writing packaging copy for Products that would end up on The Shop Floor in Malaysia or Thailand or wherever. (Well, more than there was in writing generically positive replies to the meaningless drivel left on the Facebook pages of loo-roll brands, anyway.) Productivity never felt especially high; but writing fewer words isn’t necessarily supposed to be quicker than writing more—and speed isn’t everything in writing; because the fewer the words, the more weight they can carry. The committee-like approach of some of the Naming work (after extensive Office-based Crowdsourcing) sometimes left me submitting Documents I wasn’t fully invested in. And I sometimes felt the Naming briefs could have been pretty reliably done by a carefully prompted robot. But if they could have been, they surely would have been. (Nowadays, they almost definitely are—unless the robot costs more than £250 a day in petrol or batteries or whatever...) I still couldn’t quite claim I’d ever Worked as An Agency Copywriter—my Working Dream since I graduated with an MA in Professional Writing, only exacerbated once Wife # 1 and I got in to AMC’s hit TV show “Mad Men”. But working as a Freelance Writer for The Language Consultancy was the closest I’d got. And most of the Work was fun.

Submitting the Work and Invoicing left me feeling empty though. What could I put in my portfolio? A list of 100 different possible names for a bar of soap? I never saw any of my Work in its final form. I never found out if the words I wrote even ended up being printed onto packaging and mass-produced. The only feedback I got was “The client loved it!”—or, in that one last case “The client hated it, and we’re blaming... you!”. The lack of closure for the Work I did left me somewhere short of the Dignity I felt my skills, by this point in my professional development, truly deserved.

So The Language Consultancy Job was A Bad Job.

Concluding Notes

• I never found out if I was struck off their books, or if the handful of production people at The Language Consultancy who’d warmed to me after a few successfully executed briefs had moved on—or if they just had plenty of other writers, cheaper or better than me. And I didn’t chase them for Work because I had other things going on. I got an email four years(!) later, in 2018, from someone I’d never heard of, asking if I was free to work on a Naming Job. I said I was, but not till next week. I never heard back.

  
  

• ...until several months after I wrote this chapter! Data retention misdemeanours or something of that nature meant that my email address ended up on someone or other's computer in spring 2022, by which time precisely nobody who'd worked at the consultancy when I last invoiced them remained. (Including the founders.) A protracted period of will-they-won't-they back-and-forthing ensued in which I was encouraged to sign non-disclosure agreements and fill in forms about what sort of work I'd done in the past. (I jokingly suggested they might like to read the CV I was working on, but they never asked me to "pop" them a copy...) Anyway, no work came my way, and it was all beginning to feel a bit déjà vu; as if the agency had secretly closed down and a bunch of actors had pretended to resurrect it as a piece of digital performance art. Nearly a year later a 6-month stint with a major bank was mooted, and I threw my hat into that ring only to have the hat thrown swiftly back with the announcement that the bank had chosen to go in a different direction. Half a year later still a creative director I'd never heard of sent me (and presumably some other people too) a very wordy email explaining how the fact that the company were giving up their Great Wen-based office space and switching entirely to remote working was in no way a sign that the end was nigh. Although they had, he went on to admit, sacked almost everyone who had previously worked there, including the three members of staff (perplexingly all called Elizabeth) with who I'd been exchanging emails since they got back in touch. I took this, dry-eyed and unsentimental (even mildly irritated), as a final goodbye. But the thing is... he keeps emailing me. This guy I've never emailed. From this company that hasn't given me any work for over a decade. Telling me what he's been up to. Like... at least four times a year... And I still haven't been back to The Canary Islands...

[Next chapter]