My Career is Flapping in the Wind Like That Plastic Bag in American Beauty

Sometimes it feels like there’s so much beauty in the world that I’m going to soil my drawers

Who am I kidding, really? I don’t have a career anymore.

To be honest, I’m not sure if I ever did, now I think about it. For the first ten years, I fluttered between any customer service job that would have me. I worked for banks, insurance companies, phone companies. I worked for a big bank and got fired when they discovered that I had been retrospectively (up to three years) reversing overdrawn fees for anyone who called up begging to have their thirty buck overdraw fee back so they could buy some washing up liquid and make some damn toast for breakfast.

Eventually, I landed a job selling those Orange CDMA phones door to door in Cranbourne, Pakenham, Dandenong, and other fancy suburbs of Melbourne. Often, I would enter the home of a potential customer, pat their American pitbull, who would proceed to try and eat my bollocks, and I would smoke a couple of the Spring Valley water bongs that were offered to me. And only then, under that diabolically intoxicated state, would I bring out the paperwork and sell these people his and hers silver phones that “double as your home phone.”

From that point on, I decided that sales was for me, only I moved the project indoors into various call centres around Melbourne, where I sold outbound phone plans, internet, Yellow Pages online, funeral insurance, and solar panels. Later, I ran those teams in most unorthodox ways.

Eventually, I walked into an unnamed electricity company who had put down roots in Melbourne and needed a sales team set up from scratch. I did that. I set that team up. Later, I began to do the same as a freelancer for other businesses with sales centres. One in particular was a famous solar company who wanted to start selling service plans. I wrote and implemented a high-influence sales script. When I arrived, they had a team of six doing $600 a day total. Within a week, I was doing $4,200 a day by myself.

Why am I telling you all this boring horseshit?

Because that’s what happens. We end up getting so strapped into this idea that someone will give a crap about our lives that we end up telling these boring stories to make ourselves seem interesting. All of it seems so irrelevant now. Could I still write sales scripts like that? Absolutely. Those deep influence techniques are burned into my system. But it’s like the first guy I brought in to test my script said:

“I’m not sure if this is ethical.”

He was right about that. It wasn’t that it was even unethical. To me, what made something unethical was selling somebody something they didn’t need by using hot influence techniques. If they needed it, then, if anything, it was ultra-ethical in that it helped them bypass their own sabotage techniques, which might prevent them getting something that would enhance their lives. The techniques are powerful but void of motivation. Their ethics depends entirely on which way you point them.

That’s what I always told myself, anyway.

I suppose at that point there was some semblance of a sales career which involved infrastructure and training or whatever. But somewhere around that time, I decided that I was a tremendous writer, so I moved to the forest with no one but a cat for company. I meditated every day, and I studied a diploma in Professional Writing and Editing online with a plan to sell sales-based writing to nameless clients for a fortune. My plan was that in two years I’d be travelling to far-off lands, staying in fancy hotels, eating melon balls, and sipping prosecco in the company of other highly paid digital nomads.

But I got distracted. I wrote a strange book about a fake therapist, and I self-published it. Then I wrote another book consisting of short stories I’d put on a Medium blog. I called the book Ballbag. The books kept coming, and the blog posts did too. And before long, I’d amassed a decent following and sold an amount of books that would feed at least one of my by that point three Bon Vivant cats.

I looked up from my desk one day and noticed that it had been six years since I’d done any kind of real job.

I’d been living on welfare, selling a measly amount of books, and doing editing and writing work for a few clients in Eastern Europe whose English was a mix between that of Borat and Irvine Welsh. And it all felt fine. I had a measly income and no ambitions except to become a cult writer.

But, as in any story, the protagonist can’t get comfortable. In the years following Covid, the price of yogurt went up like the FTSE 100 during an economic erection, and so did the price of rent, cat food, Kahlua, and just about everything else. Particularly the heinous rent prices meant that within five years my rent had gone from $375 a week to $675 a week. And yet my income had gone the other way.

I studied cookery because I figured it would give me something to write about and because I didn’t mind cooking and I was good at it. The result of twelve months at chef school is that I now hate food and the idea of working in a kitchen is less appealing than having my ballsack stretched from Land’s End to John o’ Groats to bust the current record (Land’s end to Coventry).

So I began doing deliveries in a van. I’m still doing them now while I look around and wonder what the fuck I am going to do. My fiction is still sitting in micro-cult status, shifting two or three books a month. My other writing and editing work is finished, not because my writing isn’t better — it’s far better — but because people would rather a mediocre piece of writing for $0.02 than a great piece of writing for $100.

I thought about leaving and moving to Thailand, but I just couldn’t leave my cats or my wife. And I remembered that in Thailand they think chillis are a vegetable.

And then I met Terry, the tramp outside Seven-Eleven that I’m always going on about.

And he told me that tech security is the most important field in the future. And he mentioned that it wasn’t even to do with pay. He said that the happiness of humans in the future will depend greatly on cyber-security and that, as an aspiring Bodhisattva, that is the work that I should undertake.

So I started by buying this book called The Dummies Guide to Hacking. And it made me realise that when it comes to tech, we are dealing with a whole new level of dummy, a level that made me personally look like I had the intelligence of that small square of cheddar left on the buffet, drying out in the sun.

I called my friend Winston, who already worked in cyber-security. He told me to start with this thing called CompTIA A+, which was like the true dummies guide to IT. And I started studying under these two apparent online gurus called Professor Messer and Jason Dion.

And here I am, motherfuckers. A month deep into this ridiculous path, still flapping, getting ready to take the A+ Core One exam and intermittently wondering what the hell I’m doing installing Ubuntu and learning about command lines and getting my brain smashed by even basic cyber-security concepts.

Sometimes I sit on the toilet for an hour googling things like:

Can a 49-year-old learn tech from scratch? Or will there still be cyber-security jobs in two years? Or what is the best way to learn Python without having a breakdown? Or why am I getting unnaturally itchy thighs?

And I think about jacking it all in and robbing a servo with a bread stick under a tea towel or selling black-market tofu to homeless vegetarians in midnight car parks or getting onto fentanyl and just standing there like they do in those videos of San Francisco or Chicago or Narnia.

But then I remember, there are people relying on me. And deep down, I remember there are no rules in this luminous playground, and, if you believe in karma, it’s all down to your own bullshit that you ended up here anyway.

And if I look back on my life, it’s not that hard to believe.

So I open up my laptop again and start a virtual machine in the latest TryHackMe. Or I watch the latest Jason Dion video on that horseshit Udemy platform.

Or I just open Terminal in Ubuntu and type ls and chmod and pretend I’m in The Matrix.

And sometimes I put it all down and sit on my bed and chant the Seven Line Prayer and remember that the reason I’m here, on this tricky sphere, is to help everyone to wake up and rest in the luminous awareness free of delusion that experiences everything without attachment. So maybe I’d better put some more effort into realising that for myself instead. After all, it might not be as complex as cyber-security, but it’s a damn sight harder to understand.

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The Obligatory End Bit:

Frank T Bird is a writer who is paranoid that AI is going to start smoking and wearing those weird coloured visors like Hunter S Thompson and write funnier stuff than him. He is learning about cybersecurity and how to talk about himself in the third person without sounding pretentious. (Work in progress.)