Curriculum Vitæ: a working life story, Chapter 23: “Why do you want to work here?”

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[[Redacted]: June 2016 – August 2016] From late 2014 to the end of 2015 I mostly Worked Remotely for an Agency my (graphic-designer) younger brother then worked at, specializing in the Not-For-Profit Sector, and an Agency Wife # 1 worked at, mostly for their big telecoms Client. The Work was never In-House, and never had regular Contracted Hours. It was bitty and frequently dull, and taught me very little, and is thus unworthy of inclusion as a Chapter of its own—even by the very Inclusive standards of this CV.

Both Agencies Paid well enough, and conducted minimal Shenanigans; but neither line of Work threatened to turn into A Proper Job. What’s more, until September 2015, when Child # 1 started at The Little Welsh School in The Village in The Hills, I spent far more of my Time traipsing around the countryside with The Children—studying OS maps, hunting megaliths, and recording videos of me reciting poems—than I spent in Paid Work. Personally it was a time of reflection, exploration, and spiritual and creative growth. But professionally I was beginning to fear I was as metaphorically mired as I often found myself literally so while exploring the public footpaths and common land in the Landsker County's moist upland north.

Child # 1 went to The Kindergarten at The Steiner School in The Wet Valley for a while. Everything there was made of clay or wool. It was nice, but a bit mouldy. And I tired of reversing up crumbling single-lane D-roads that were never intended to accommodate rush-hour traffic of (mostly) Middle Class (mostly) English Hippies—the majority of whom, I noted, were either unwilling or unable to reverse their own cars. I was Class Rep for The Kindergarten for a bit, which entailed nothing more than sending a few emails over the course of 2014. That might not sound like much, but I spent ages worrying about the right words for the emails, Prospective Employer; thus that at-least-theoretically voluntary role occupied a lot of Head Space at that time in my life. We attended some “work days” at the school, where I’d stand at the top of ladders precariously balanced by a precipice above a thundering river, and I’d try to nail battens to joists in order to secure rockwool in place on a building with no external walls. I ran a lucky-dip stall at The Summer Fete, and in ways such as this we tried (but ultimately failed) to integrate ourselves into the Steiner School community. But I don’t think I’ve ever put any of this on a CV; and it did nothing to develop me professionally.

We didn’t make many friends at The Kindergarten. Few of the Middle Class English Hippies seemed to warm to me or Wife # 1. I wasn’t sure why, because obviously we were both nice. But I suspected it was because although we too were Middle Class and English, we were demonstrably not Hippies; and we were probably therefore the least favourite Demographic of Middle Class English Hippies, probably because we reminded them of their parents. Wife # 1 wore jeans and worked in Digital Marketing, neither of which, from what we could gather, were considered Wholesome Attributes by that community. For no particular reason other than laziness on my part, I by then had a beard and long hair—and could thus “pass” as a Hippy—but I wasn’t Crafty or Practical. I was someone who Worked (albeit increasingly rarely) at a Desk. And I was still pretty useless at DIY at this point. When I said I was a Writer, people sometimes looked interested and asked me what I wrote—perhaps hoping or even expecting that I was an academic engaged in some form of environmentalist polemicism. But when I replied with the staple line “whatever people pay me to!” they looked cross, which I took to mean that my answer (the only truthful one that was satisfactorily short) had been the wrong answer. Sometimes I’d tentatively add that I also liked to write Poetry now and then, in my spare time, and then people would invariably have to suddenly leave. (Sorry about all the adverbs, Prospective Employer: but that's how it happened.)

By mid 2015 Wife # 1 wasn’t getting as much Freelance Work as she had in previous years, and was concerned that most of it was coming from just the one Client—meanwhile, my Work was coming from her getting work for me from the same Client. So Wife # 1 suggested we take the drastic step of forming Our Own Agency. We already had a Limited Company by this Time; having got sick of dealing with Umbrella Companies and whatnot. We hired my younger brother, who’d recently been made Redundant from his not-for-profit-sector serving agency, which was increasingly failing to make a profit, to make us a website. I don’t think we got as far as a Business Plan. We knew that phase one was “Get a website” and that phase three was “Profit”; but we (like so many digital conquistadors in the dying days of the Dot Com Boom) were still struggling with phase two. Wife # 1’s skills were the higher level stuff: strategy, planning, strategic planning, and planning-strategy—okay, Prospective Employer, I’ll be honest: I don’t know what my wife does for a living; but I do sometimes proofread the sentences on her PowerPoint slides, and they very rarely require significant editing. My Skills, as you already know, were writing, editing, blogging, and running Social Media profiles. 

Actually, I hadn’t done much blogging lately; I’d got rid of four old blogs a couple of years ago and replaced them with two new Wordpress-based Websites: one for my Poetry Company, Doubtist Books; and one for The Micronation I was planning to declare independent from the UK in tandem with the publication of my second poetry book in December 2015. This was to be called The Most Serene Republic of Landskeria. Named after the Landsker Line in The Landkser County: “Landsker” being an Early Modern English term from Southwest England (and the historically English-speaking southern fringes of West Wales) roughly corresponding with “Border”.

So: Our Agency. We called it Velky & Velky—for obvious reasons—and we billed ourselves as “two seasoned social media specialists and an ever-expanding team of professionals for hire”. The Team, at this juncture, was imaginary. I started a Twitter account, and after three months I started tweeting boring Work stuff like Industry Insights and Observations about Brand and Tone-of-Voice. By 2016 we had a Website, and it said “We work with brands and creative agencies to fill skills-gaps in social by providing strategy, training and people.” 

We contacted Ex-Colleagues to write testimonials. I got one from the Bossman of Ad Agency # 2, one from Patrick from The Language Consultancy, and one from Bossman Roger from The University Job. I also asked my Bossman from The Boutique Agency to write a recommendation concerning my social-media skills, but he said “No” because we might end up being Competitors if he ever decided to venture outside of The Music Industry. I was dubious; I’d tried to get him to do just that in the months leading up to the time I left The Great Wen—having found out via Girlfriend # 3 just how much more Money other Sectors paid for Social Media Work—and he wouldn’t do it then, so I doubted he’d ever do it. And I was a bit pissed off at him, to be honest.

In February 2016, one of Wife # 1’s old Work Contacts got in touch to ask if we could get a community manager for [Redacted], a [Redacted] where he worked. So I wrote a Job Ad, we posted it on Indeed, and Wife # 1 interviewed a couple of people via Skype. A few weeks or possibly months later, we sent the first (and, it would transpire, the last) member of our “ever-expanding team” out to Work. Some time around March I wrote a blog-post for our website about the discontinuation of the Twitter “favourite” star button, which had recently been replaced by a heart. I think that was the only blog-post I wrote for our Agency Website.

But Wife # 1 was by this time already in high-level talks about maybe getting a Full-Time Job with [Redacted]. She was in two minds about it, because she’d really wanted us to get our Agency up and running, and we’d barely even got going; much less given it A Proper Go. I was struggling to give it much at all beyond blog posts and tweets nobody wanted to read, because I still had a toddler to look after for the four Working Days a week when we didn’t have any Childcare—and I was frantically trying to finish rewriting The Novel I’d first completed (to an unsatisfactory standard) around the time I moved to The Great Wen, having capriciously rekindled it while on holiday with the family in Munster in June 2015. 

Wife # 1’s Dream had been to start an Agency together, build it up over a few years (or decades) as a successful niche-interest Digital Marketing / Social Media Service; build a seamlessly effective Remote Working Team that made itself indispensable to other Agencies or direct Clients, or both, and then to Sell The Agency to A Bigger Agency and retire. We’d both enjoyed Freelancing for a while... Although, had we? I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t have imagined doing a proper Job while looking after two small kids in a mouse-infested house with no central heating; but I didn’t feel I’d been A Very Successful Freelancer either. I mean, I’d made a bit of Money now and then when we were desperate. And we’d got rid of most of the mice. And we usually managed to pay the Bills on Time, and we were over-paying on The Mortgage. And we’d finally got central-heating installed—so there was a bit less of a mediaeval feel about the place. If only we could get a regular, reliable Income. And get rid of The Horrible Carpet…

About a year after we (i.e. Wife # 1) had the idea to start Our Own Agency, and six months after our Website went live, our Agency got… not exactly bought; but sort of subsumed by [Redacted]. And suddenly it was either All Over or All Beginning, depending on your point of view. The deal was that [Redacted] would employ Wife # 1 Full-Time as a [Redacted]; but they could only do that if they also employed me Full-Time, but on Part-Time hours (2.5 days a week), as a Senior [Redacted] at a salary of £40,000 pro rata, which I imagined would make me rich beyond my wildest dreams; even though it would actually only be £20,000 because I would only be working 2.5 days a week. I say only; that was still more hours than I’d worked with any regularity since I left The DIY Job back in 2012.

Before I go into what little detail I feel I'm allowed to about the [Redacted] Job, there’s a minor extracurricular addition to the CV to get out of the way first, in the shape of Poetry Book # 2.

Poetry book # 2

Before I published my debut Poetry Book, I’d not submitted the poems anywhere else in advance. This was due to my desire for a DIY aesthetic, born of bitterness over the Faber & Faber rejection three years earlier. So when two reviewers said that my first book was bad, while I didn't completely agree with them, I had no contrary evidence with which to console myself. So this time I’d entered some poems into competitions by way of insurance, and a grand total of three had some joy (out of 33 in the book, about half of which I’d sent out to somewhere-or-other, at least once, but sometimes twice). None of my poems actually won anything. But “John Simpson’s burka” and “Sonnets from the corners of the map” were shortlisted in the 2013 and 2014 Live Canon International Competitions, which you certainly won't have heard of, and were subsequently published alongside some real poets in the resulting anthologies. Both of my poems were also performed in The Great Wen by actors from the Live Canon Ensemble. I missed the first performance because Child # 2 was busy being born; but I attended the second, and my poem was the last of three that the judge (A British Poet that is relatively Famous among British Poets) commended, before announcing the actual winning poem—the author of which won £1,000 and by now has his own Wikipedia page. 

Fortunately I was already used to such cruél poetic near misses. In 2010 a poem of mine from the North Welsh Thomas-Hardy-inspired narrative collection that Faber & Faber rejected had come second in an Irish poetry prize. (Again, the winner got £1,000; and again, I got nothing.) On that occasion the editor of the resulting anthology rendered the title of my poem in Comic Sans; and although they promised to post me a free copy, they didn’t, so I had to buy one to see my name in print for the first time. I was invited to a celebratory event in The Rebel City in Munster, which sounded very tempting; but they weren’t paying my ferry fare, and I couldn't afford it, so I didn’t go. I did pay the exorbitant train fare to go to The Great Wen to see my poem not winning the third competition in which I'd been shortlisted. But at least I knew somebody there whose sofa I could sleep on.

The third poem from The New Book to be published was “Kuzka’s mother”—probably the best poem in the book. It was shortlisted in a competition called Poetic Republic: the only major poetry prize at that time judged by anonymous peer review; which in my view ought to be how all such competitions are judged. My work was compared with W. H. Auden by not one, Prospective Employer, but three of my peer “judges”. (And I’d never read any of his poetry before, so I couldn't realistically have been accused of copying him.)  

Wife # 1 (who, while broadly supportive of my hobbies, viewed all of this faffing about with a healthy suspicion) said that if I was publishing Another Poetry Book, I had to do something to actually Promote it this time, so I (who, after all, lived in our house) wasn’t left with boxes of unsold copies taking up space and offering tempting potential habitats to passing rodents. So we arranged a launch event in A Room Above A Pub in The Great Wen—because we didn’t know enough people who lived anywhere else. I thought I should practise reading poems not in a shed and in front of actual people. So I went to a poetry-reading group in The Landsker Town. But that place had the atmosphere of (how I imagined) an Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting, and I didn’t much enjoy it. So I went to a poetry-performance evening instead, a half-hour drive up the B-road to The Border Town in the next county. I went there three times, but didn’t enjoy that much either: I attended alone, I had to nurse one drink over two and a half hours, and although there was a broadly supportive atmosphere, I never made any friends. After my first reading, The Owner of A Local Publishing Company bought a copy of My Debut Poetry Book; but I don’t think he could have liked it much because it turned up for sale on Amazon a few months later. 

My Second Poetry Book was called “Rhymes for all times” and its theme was the uneasy relationship between History and Truth. I crowdfunded it via Kickstarter, again, raising more Money this time—but from fewer Customers; so The Book Paid for Itself, and I even had some Money left over to get a custom flag manufactured for my new Micronation. I’d hoped that because The New Book was slightly better than The First, it might sell more copies. But of the 200 copies I optimistically had printed, I still have just over 100 stored in boxes in my shed and a drawer in my bedroom. I launched the book in The Great Wen on December 1, 2015. Between 20 and 30 people came, including but not limited to colleagues from Ad Agency # 2, The DIY Company, and The Music Website, and friends from The MA Course, The University (but not The University Job!) and various family members and Friends going back to Sixth Form days. There was wine. I had an open-mic thing in-between my performances. Greg read a rather graphic ghost story about dogging. Elen from The Manic Street Preachers Chat Room played two songs from her new electropop solo album. Lou read an ominous poem about data centres. An actual real poet who I’d met Online read two poems from her new collection, which I’d already bought and enjoyed. And a friend of a friend who’d helped fund my book read a short essay about the disparity between Online- and IRL identities. Last but not least, Celebrity Guest Lloyd James of London-based rock band Nævus performed two live acoustic songs. 

Shandy served as my prompt for poems I’d learnt in order to “perform” but was worried I’d forget at least part of; and I only forgot one of them to any significant degree. I read the other poems, which I hadn't managed to memorize, from the book. And I Declared Independence from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland via the reading of my poem “Landskeria” which stated my claim of sovereignty of The Most Serene Republic of Landskeria in The House on The Corner, back in West Wales. I also read the WB Yeats poem “The Second Coming” over a piece of atmospheric keyboard music I borrowed from a musician called Rami who I used to watch at open-mic nights back in Pennycomequick. To conclude the event, at my insistence, Shandy performed an acoustic rendition of the Robbie Williams song “Advertising Space” with the alternative lyrics I’d written that made it a song about The Commodification of Remembrance instead of a song about Elvis Presley.

I enjoyed the launch of my second poetry book, Prospective Employer. Thank you for asking (if you did). But no publication reviewed “Rhymes for all times” and it subsequently sank without a trace. One day I’ll probably burn or pulp the unsold copies, but I haven’t got around to it yet. The performance went better than expected, and I remember thinking that perhaps I should make an effort to attend local open mic nights on a more regular basis, to improve my confidence and seek integration into the local literary community. But that notion turned with the weather. And, the better part of a decade later, I haven't since read or performed any poetry to anybody outside of my shed. Except that one time I was commissioned to perform an ode to a dead pig at some smallholder friends' sausage-making party. But, at the risk of stating the obvious, that was an extraordinary circumstance...

The role

Wife # 1 was more heavily invested in the [Redacted] Job than I was, because she was now Working Full-Time for [Redacted] and no longer had the privilege of being Freelance, and being able to decide her own Hours and Holidays, etc. In the short-term, this manifested itself in Wife # 1 having to go to The Great Wen a lot more than she expected, which was a lot more than she already had been, which was already more than she’d hoped to when we first moved to West Wales and went Freelance. The fact that all of our Work—which could broadly be categorized as Digital Marketing—was able to be done Online, or via Telephone or Videotelephony like Skype, did not stop Agencies insisting that we had to be in rooms in The Great Wen, experiencing their Workplaces first-hand. I knew this as well as Wife # 1; but as the main Bread-Winner, before, during, and after the [Redacted] Job, Wife # 1 bore the brunt of it.

My Work, it transpired, was mostly blogging. And it didn’t seem to take anything like 2.5 days a week. It was more like a day and a half, with emails and corrections going back and forth to someone in the [Redacted] office. The blogs were mostly about [Redacted], which wasn’t necessarily an Area of Interest or Specialist Knowledge for me, as I've at least hinted before, Prospective Employer. But being a Professional Writer I was more than capable of rising to the challenge. [Redacted], I was beginning to understand, having not paid quite as much attention as I might have going into the Job, was actually a [Redacted] that worked almost solely for The [Redacted] Industry; which I suppose might technically have been expected t make it more Glamorous than a lot of the Freelance Work I’d done up to that point. But I was concerned from the off that Wife # 1 wasn’t as happy with the arrangement with [Redacted] as I was. As it transpired, we’d barely got into our new roles when Wife # 1 decided we’d made A Terrible Mistake and that the [Redacted] Job was A Non-Starter because it was increasingly incompatible with the Life Plan we’d set out for ourselves when we first moved to West Wales—also [Redacted], the [Redacted] of [Redacted] was turning out to be a real pain in the [Redacted], and would thus surely be impossible to Work with in the long term.

Less than two months after we’d signed our contracts with [Redacted]—and less than one month after the UK (more specifically, England and Wales) voted in a referendum on the eve of my 33rd birthday to leave the European Union—in the interests of her long-term Mental Health, Wife # 1 threw in the towel (that is, her towel and mine; the latter being attached to the former and really much more of a flannel) and our contracts with [Redacted] were promptly cancelled. There’s not much more I can say about the Work I did for [Redacted], even though this was over five years ago, because [Redacted] still exist in some shape or form, although nowadays as something more akin to a [Redacted] than a [Redacted]—actually, I suspect that they might have been [Redacted] by another [Redacted] based on something I saw the other day on [Redacted]. The [Redacted] who first approached Wife # 1 about the [Redacted] Job—who was a [Redacted] of Wife # 1 in a former [Redacted]—ended up leaving [Redacted] anyway. And it subsequently turned out that [Redacted], the [Redacted] of [Redacted], could be quite [Redacted] toward people who [Redacted] her [Redacted]. So discretion being the better part of valour in these matters, although I'd love to tell you more about this actual Job than I told you about the poetry book I sold literally tens of copies of in the previous year, Prospective Employer, it might be best for both of us (but especially me) if I say no more on the subject.

Good Job or Bad Job?

The [Redacted] Job promised to be Easy Money, personally. But of course there’s no such thing as Easy Money in the long-term, Prospective Employer. Not for people of my socioeconomic group (or lower) at any rate—this Job taught me that, if nothing else. What began as A Nightmare Scenario for Wife # 1 could never have brought Long-Term Prosperity to me while I valued our relationship more than any given working relationship I might have entered into. What's more, the [Redacted] culture at [Redacted] would never have suited me anyway. For the short time I worked for [Redacted] it was just like any other [Redacted] Job, but with the added stress that anything I did wrong might reflect badly on Wife # 1, who was much more senior than me—in A Business Sense, Prospective Employer; although she is actually about three and a half years older than me in chronological terms as well.

Given that it nearly drove Wife # 1 to A Nervous Breakdown in only about six weeks, it’s difficult for me to consider the part of the Job that only pertained to me in isolation. However, I'm also wary as you will surely have noticed by this point in the chapter of saying anything that might feasibly be considered harmful to [Redacted]'s [Redacted]. Thus, I can therefore only conclude that the [Redacted] Job was A [Redacted] Job.

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