I just want to make it clear, this is not about my French teacher Miss Teps. She looked quite intéressant to a 12-year-old. Now where was I? Oh yes, missteps.
I’ve made a few, more than I care to mention. The one I dare share here was a big decision I made at university. You see, I picked Law and Philosophy as a joint honours thingummy. Philosophy was a no-brainer (there’s got to be a pun in there somewhere) because I was already fascinated with these fancy things called ‘ideas’. I thought it would be quite useful to future me to try to understand “what the hell are we doing here?” and “why is [deleted] greed the driving force in human society?”
Yes, okay, I was naïve. But not as naïve as how I viewed The Law at the time.
In the grandiose style of yoof, I waved my hand dismissively at the very thought of becoming, wait for it, a LAWYER. Such a sellout wasn’t for me. No, I told friends*, I’d rather hire a lawyer than be one. What I’d need to hire them for was left dangling in the air. Like my pangs for Miss Teps.
So, to get to the point – I hear you George Orwell – from that moment on, I wove an odds & sods tapestry of career steps that precluded using my legal-starter-training to make a living. Can you guess the scorecard?
Post-uni job applications: numberless. Responses: nul points. Sales office gopher: one (annus horribilis, check spelling). Own business try-outs: two. Business failures: two. Ice cream van man: one (tepid summer). Chauffeur: four (hours sleep a night max, but I did get some notable autographs, and an inkling of where the rich & famous get their kicks). Magazine rep: one (but five counties). Painter & decorator: one (room until the mansion owner realised I didn’t know diddly, as in Trump supporters). Fiction writing: several (manuscripts collecting monstrous spiderwebs in my Declined File). Digging ditches for a new golf course: one (day we were discovered sitting in wheelbarrows waving at a pilot, whose promo shots featuring men in wheelbarrows went on display in the clubhouse). This sobering list is endless, so my editor is now screaming: “C’mon, wrap it up!”
Anyways… yep, I’m down with them kids… eventually I struck precious metal, $2,694.34 an ounce and counting. An actual golden career po-si-tion. I was granted admission to the grand world of Advertising. Trainee copywriter. Whereby I could use whatever ability I’d managed to amass in the previous paragraph. And zip forward to today, via yonks of writing roles and sandwich-spread rolls for luncheon, I find myself for three years now at the lang cat, the apotheosis of Good Places To Write Stuff that is valued. And get paid for it. Amazing.
So here we are. I coulda been rrrich in legal practice. Missteps many, but really? In the great big scheme of things, it has all worked out nicely. Rien, je le regrette. Except maybe if Miss Teps had been ten years younger, and me ten years older…
* Few stayed the distance
