In spite of my dishonorable discharge, I was back on duty in no time. I googled for companies until I came across a website hosted by the Coastal Carolina University. The university’s Kimbel Library has a page called Cheating 101: Internet Paper Mills, which provides links to roughly two hundred paper-mill companies and dozens of additional links breaking down the various subsidiary companies that are syndicated under a single name. If you want to know the names of the companies I have worked for, I can’t tell you. But most of them are on that webpage.
Originally created as supplemental material for a 1999 presentation on cheating prevention, the page was designed to function as an instrument for identifying, hindering, and punishing academic dishonesty. I have used it as my own personal Monster.com. Can you imagine? Can you imagine that in this economy, where we pretend not to be insulted by the verbal pretense of begging for work on a site called Flipdog, where we risk unsolicited sexual assault every time we scan Craigslist’s Gigs category, where we throw our names into a pool so large that there’s always a risk that our application could get mixed up with the application of another guy who has the exact same name… Can you imagine that just a week after being fired, I was copying and pasting one cover letter and writing sample and sending them out to every company in my field without even a hint of competition?
It was September 2004, and I had my very own classifieds.
Good thing, really, since I was applying for two. I could work for no company that would not also have Ethan as its employee. I owed him that at the very least. At the very least.
I received ten responses, and after reading my sample work and Ethan’s sample work, the most promising of the companies agreed to hire us both.
And we were off and writing once again.
Ultimately, we took the bulk of our work from the one company that paid best. This company’s model was different from that employed by my old company. The new company brought in almost as much work, but its system was slightly less automated. Every minute of every day, my in-box would flood with e-mails detailing available assignments: for example, “plant species of the Paleolithic era: 10 pages, Due 2/14, 6 sources, APA format, College (4th year).”
I would respond with a quote: “I can write this for $130.”
I would receive a “Go Ahead” e-mail from the company anytime one of my bids was accepted. Then the paper was my responsibility. Once it was completed, I would forward it to the customer using an e-mail service provided by the company. At the end of each week, I would calculate my total earnings and invoice the company using PayPal. This company didn’t have the handy calendar system maintained by my previous employer. I had to keep track of my own finances, so I created an assignment book. The assignment book became a constant companion, a predictor of fortunes and miseries ahead.
Ethan and I were taking some regular work from a hodgepodge of paper-writing websites. None were quite as prolific or profitable as our primary employer, and some were downright shady Eastern European websites without phone numbers or direct e-mail addresses. But I was taking work anywhere I could get it. Unless otherwise noted, my assignments were almost always due by eleven fifty-nine p.m. eastern standard time.
At the main company I worked for, we submitted assignments and e-mailed customers through a company-assigned e-mail box, but the bulk of the correspondence was mediated by Melissa, the customer service representative.
These were the years when I really sharpened my tools. Because the company’s system was not as automated, and because I developed a reputation with my employer for efficiency and a willingness to take on unpleasant assignments, I would receive daily e-mails from Melissa. The details of a particular assignment would be forwarded to me with an inquiry such as “this one?,” “can you complete something like this?,” or “pretty please?”
It was the beginning of a whole new training regimen. If I’d been a fastball pitcher who occasionally used a changeup to throw off the batter, I was now being asked to develop a curveball, a slider, and a knuckleball while spending considerable time working at the batting cages, too. I was becoming a multidimensional player. I said I would write anything, and they held me to it. Even if I preferred the rhetorical fluffiness of history and sociology, I was being asked to report on tax law, to explore the epidemiology of kidney failure, to dissect competing economic theories, to explain American monetary policy, to outline the changes in data management trends. In short, I was being asked to write things that nobody would ever volunteer for. And I never said no.
At a certain point, with business cranking, Ethan and I even created our very own paper-writing company and website with the intention of cutting out the middleman. Almost universally, wherever I have worked, you collect half the money and the company collects the other half. We figured we could charge a little less overall and still make more. We enlisted Donovan Root and Bobby, another of our computer-prodigy friends, and we collectively designed a fully functional e-commerce website.
We called it Paper911. It was a flop.
We got a couple of regular clients. One guy from Saudi Arabia ordered three papers a week from us for a year. But ultimately, it was tough to compete with the type of work we were getting from the other companies combined. There was also a growing sense for both Ethan and I, as the intensity of this way of making a living became ever more apparent, that one could not realistically attach oneself to this kind of profession and hope to ever be a normally functioning human being. The body simply wouldn’t stand for it, to say nothing of the psyche. Paper911 folded from disinterest as the workload from the other companies increased.
Then, in 2005, Ethan bailed. He was burned out and tired of working his ass off for pennies. I couldn’t say I blamed him. He got a job at a big-time Fortune 500 company writing project proposals. He told them exactly what he’d been doing for a living all these years, and they found the experience fascinating. I was most officially on my own now. Just me and the assignment book.
My constant bedside partner was the sleepless night. Greeting me in the morning was the cycloptic stare of my computer. And my assignments were getting bigger, too.
I wrote an eighty-page paper on kava, which is a mildly hallucinogenic substance ingested ceremonially by the tribal people of Fiji. I loved that paper. Did you know that at low tide you can literally wade from one Fijian island to the next?
I also wrote fifty pages on the plays of Tennessee Williams in two parts. A little melodramatic at times but compelling nonetheless. Dude choked to death on the cap from his over-the-counter eyedrops. The longest papers weren’t always the worst ones.
It was usually the customer who made it terrible.
The following exchange concerns the completion of several admissions essays for a student with big dreams.
The standard prospective-assignment e-mail contains the following prompt to the customer, along with additional disclaimers:
To ensure that your writer completes this paper to your satisfaction, we encourage you to send the name and level of your class as well as any other information you feel is important—including any faxed materials—as soon as possible.
If you do not inform the writer ahead of time concerning any special requirements, we cannot be responsible if we do not follow them!
I received an e-mail from Melissa.
Interested in this one? Due in five days… If so, bid?
http://www.psu.edu/ admissions/ intlapply/ pdf/ IntlSupplement.pdf
How much would it cost me to get those essay questions answered?
I responded.
I can write this for $25. I can answer each of these two questions in the space of a page, using information provided by the client to highlight academic achievements and other personal accomplishments entitling admission to Penn State.
Melissa gave me the go-ahead with the following instructions:
Please do these, and thanks! And please do the OPPOSITE of the bilingual dictionary assignment with him—he was VERY CLEAR that he wants an “ivy league” writer (his words)… Thanks!
Very shortly thereafter, she sent me the following request:
These would be for the same client as the PSU ones (which I am about to assign to you)…
Can you do as well? If so, bid? (total 2600 words)
I need my Brown essays: italics are my comments
Question #1:
Tell us about the academic areas which interest you most and your reasons for applying to Brown.
I want this to be about 750 words. What interested me most was Brown’s location and it’s student body. I need the writer to elaborate and find other things about brown that make it interesting
Question #2:
Who interested you in Brown (e.g., college counselor, Brown alumnus/a, admission officer, undergraduate, relative)?
No one interested me in Brown. I have searched through many Ivy League schools and I foun that brown is
The top choice for me due to it’s great collegiate sports for entertainment, and it’s great professors. About 350 words would do it.
Question #3:
In reading your application, we want to get to know you as well as we can. We ask that you use this opportunity to tell us something more about yourself that would help us toward a sense of who you are, how you think, and what issues and ideas interest you most.
This is where I need the writer to throw some sort of hook that will make them really look at me. I need about 1500 words that will really blow the wall open with explosiveness.
As you will have noticed above, the customer did not provide me with any information regarding his chosen area of study, his academic strengths, or his professional aspirations. So I simply did my best to blow the wall open with explosiveness.
And I can do this because I’ve written a lot of admissions essays. According to a U.S. Census Bureau report, in 2009 there were more than nineteen million students enrolled in two-year colleges, four-year colleges, and graduate schools. And of course, most of them probably applied to multiple schools. And that was just the people who got in. So if my calculations are correct, that amounts to a metric fuckload of admissions essays.
God help the poor souls who have been charged with the responsibility of reading them, of wading through claims of personal excellence, of challenges met and bested, of spin-doctored triumph, of tragedy terrible enough to distinguish the individual as having depth and experience, all to find that perfectly singular little snow-flake in a blizzard of poorly obscured mediocrity.
I wonder how frequently this is actually a rewarding job. How often can millions of people asking for the same exact thing every single year find a unique way to ask for it? So I do my best to make the admissions-essay readers’ job a little more interesting. I indulge in the generic and craft sentences that seem to view their own content as remarkable in spite of its mundane obviousness.
The student wants you to know that he has overcome a great deal of personal anguish brought on by the death of his great-grandparent, and that watching a man die in his late nineties really makes you think.
So I say, “I have stared unblinking into the eyes of the grim specter of death. Perhaps more than most students, I have come face-to-face with the fragility of human life. That a man could be snuffed out so easily and senselessly would fill me, though, not with a sense of dread but instead with a sense of determination. Life is short and precious. I am determined to make every second count, beginning with my selection of a university such as yours. No doubt, my time on earth will have been well spent should the next four years of it be in the company of your brilliant professors, your diverse student body, and your state-of-the-art facilities.”
Or the student says that he wants his hoped-for university to know that he learned a sense of personal responsibility in high school during his fifteen hours a week stocking shelves at the Safeway for minimum wage.
So I say, “As a young man, I had a distinctly tragic upbringing. I toiled in a Dickensian sweatshop without proper fire safety regulations. I learned in my early teens that survival is largely a consequence of determination, willpower, and optimism. Every time I tasted the lash of my supervisor’s whip, I closed my eyes and dreamed of a brighter day when I might sit beside my peers at a university and learn how to make a better life for myself, and in turn, for the world.”
Or the student wants me to make some explanation for why his performance in high school was relatively subpar and why his college performance will be considerably better.
So I say that “I boldly faced the challenge of balancing my studies with a full extracurricular schedule. In addition to my participation in after-school sports and my active role in student government, I spent the better part of my time outside of the classroom battling the unending scourge that is the walking undead. In my junior year, I succeeded in fighting off a zombie apocalypse while maintaining a 2.8 GPA. While my dedication to my studies may not be reflected in my class rank, the fact that the world has not yet been overrun with pus-spitting, brain-eating corpses is a testament to the work ethic that I will bring to your campus if granted admission.”
Well, anyway, this was my general take on how best to approach my Penn State and Brown essays. This guy seemed like a sport. And he seemed like a business major. And since he didn’t give me any information at all on the Penn State essay, not even so much as the suggestion that I blow the wall open with explosiveness, I used what I could glean from the Brown notes. And I wrote an explosive, wall-blowing-open essay for Penn State about my business acumen and ambitions.
I guess I had misjudged him.
A day after completion, Melissa forwarded the following e-mail, straight from the customer:
See, He didn’t ask me.
I wanted to go into the Premedicine/Medical 6 year program.
This needs to be done, and quick.
Melissa followed this up with her own message.
Hey Dave,
Can you please either revise, or explain to him why what you
did will work?
I also told him that it was HIS responsibility to send you information, not yours to ask…
Thanks,
Melissa.
Now the timing was pretty bad. I was on a train heading up to New York with Harmon. Harmon and I have been friends our whole lives, going back to diapers, nursery school, and row homes in Northeast Philly. We were on our way to see Tom W. play a show in the city.
We had also grown up with Tom W., a rock singer now verging on mainstream recognition. At the time of the show, he was an unknown singer-songwriter zigzagging desperately across North America and Europe for gigs while living in Queens.
He was doing a homecoming show after his most recent road wars. So I got this bitchy little customer e-mail while I was trying to enjoy the uniquely scorched and devastated stretch of the Northeast Corridor from New Jersey’s Metropark onward.
I pried my eyes away from the view and an unconscious fantasy about survival in the Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome world streaking by us.
I opened my laptop and composed the following message:
Naturally, having never received any details from the customer on personal preference, aside from the italicized information accompanying the Brown essay request, I made some assumptions. I don’t mind fixing the essay up, but it’s up to the customer to provide me with any information he’d like to highlight. Otherwise, I’m left to my own resources and I tend to be creative. I can fix this by tomorrow morning but I would advise the customer to provide me with as much detail as he’d like. Likewise for the Brown essays, which I will confirm as well, the more detail, the better.
Dave,
I hear you, completely, and I told him this. Between you and me, he can be really obnoxious. Anyway—like I said, I did tell him this, but for the Brown essays, can you please also tell him this, and BCC me? That way, there will be no misunderstandings, and there will be a record that you told him to send whatever he wanted you to know…
Thanks, and I appreciate this, Melissa
Melissa,
I could theoretically have the PSU revision completed to night if the customer were to forward some basic details. For some strange reason, though, he has not sent any such information. Also, regarding the Brown material, if he should confirm these essays, I would need additional information.
Let me know if you hear from him. Thanks.
Dave
Dave,
I have told him now twice that he needs to send you more information. So, since he has been well-informed, all you can do is your best, and if he’s still not happy, he will have to live with that. :-)
Thanks!
Melissa
Ok. That sounds fine by me. Let me know if you hear from him.
Thank you, I will!
I closed my laptop as we pulled into Penn Station. We had to grab a taxi and get to the venue. We got to a mildewy dive on Avenue B at eight, and Tom W. wouldn’t go on until eleven. Plenty of time to get started on my Brown essays with a new focus on my premed studies. If I could knock those out now, I could hope to get enough information from the student to complete the PSU revisions before morning.
Harmon and I walked outside and smoked a joint in an empty basketball court. I humped a computer pack on my back like the dork in my army platoon. Then we returned to the bar, jammed a bunch of dollars into the jukebox, and ordered dinner, which was a Guinness and a shot of tequila. As I wrote, we repeated this order every thirty minutes until Tom W. went on. I finished up my Brown essays and sent them to the customer.
By the time Tom W. got up there, his solo performance looked like a power trio to me. My vision was sliding in and out of focus like a windshield with slow-moving wipers.
It was around midnight, right in the middle of Tom’s set, when I got yet another e-mail.
Dave,
Here is the latest correction from [the customer] re: Brown revisions… I’ve been assuming 4 characters per word…Thanks, and please let me know when you can do them and if you need more money… Thanks! :-)
Melissa
Melissa,
I have no idea what this guy is asking for. When I mentioned to him that I would revise the PSU paper, he failed to provide me with additional information in the due time so I assumed he didn’t need the edit. For $15, I can go through it and suit it to a premed. course of study. As for the Brown essay, I have no idea what he’s talking about. I’m not sure how to help him.
Dave,
That’s OK.
I think he didn’t realize you needed more information for the PSU paper. Can you please ask him for more, and explain to him what you told me?
Also, what he wants, basically, is for you to edit the Brown essays down from whatever the word counts are now to 1500 characters (or, probably about 500 words) for the first essay, 500 characters (or probably about 100 words) for the second essay, and 3500 characters (or about 700 words) for the third one… Melissa
As we sorted through this, the customer sent another message, which Melissa forwarded my way.
Have not gotten my penn state revision
Can you resend the link I gavey ou for the supplement and the essay?
Now it should bear noting that I was hammered at this point, when I composed the following message in an attempt to recount the series of events that had led us to this impasse:
Melissa,
I have to tell you, I am intensely confused over the dealings with this customer. I am prepared to make an edit to the PSU essay for $15 as stated, though the customer still has not responded with additional information. I decided to charge for this edit due both to the fact that the revisions differ from the initial assignment instructions and that the customer has been so difficult to communicate with. Either way, the information that i have been given constitutes a completely restructured essay that is entirely different than the first one requested.
After reviewing the customer’s error regarding the Brown essay, I would say that the same is necessary. In order to conduct a revision, I will need to ask for an additional $35.
Just between the two of us, this customer is very difficult to deal with. I don’t mind doing all the work but this person doesn’t seem to know what he’s asking for until it has already been completed incorrectly.
Give me the go-ahead at these rates above, and I will have all of these editorial changes ready by tomorrow morning. Let me know. Thanks.
Dave
Dave,
He really is difficult, I totally agree. I have had to tell him to stop swearing at me several times (and frankly, I swear all the time, but NOT online to people with whom I am conducting business. I mean, really).
Anyway—please do the PSU revisions for $15 and the Brown
revisions for $35.
Thanks!!!
Melissa
Melissa,
I’ll take care of these revisions by morning.
Maybe I’ll throw some obscenities into the revisions. He may
like them better that way.
Dave
Dave,
Well, if you do, let me know and I will send you a list of his favorites. ;-)
Melissa
When Tom W. finished his set, he came down and had a round with us, then we hopped a train for his Queens apartment. On the train, my “conscience” kicked in. My conscience lives in my stomach and is particularly sensitive to the evils of alcohol.
I sat in a sweaty pallor on the train, with my head dipping crane-like between my knees, closing my eyes to fight off the stroboscopic motion of the car windows, then swiftly opening them to fight off the vertiginous brain-eclipse spins.
We had boarded a full train, but people shuffled off at every station. With each pulsing stop, my head became more jumbled and my innards more stewed.
I did my best to wait until the car was mostly empty.
Harmon looked at me and asked, “Dude, you gonna make it?”
Nope. Couldn’t even shake my head to tell him. I jumped up, went to the far end of the car, where the handicapped benches were, and painted the empty space with stomach chowder.
The train was pulling to a stop as I finished up.
I returned to my friends.
Tom said, “Um… let’s… move to another car.” As we walked through the door, the one poor bastard left in the car was holding his nose and grimacing in disgust.
I mumbled a meek apology at him, which (so far as I can remember) he did not accept. A few stops later, we were at Tom’s house. I had a big glass of water and sat down to write about why I thought that I would make a perfect addition to the student body at PSU and why I felt that my premedical major would best be pursued at the storied Ivy League institution of Brown University.
With my eyes squinted, with my brain rotating slowly one way, then forcing itself back to center like an oversized microwave casserole, with my back pressed firmly up against the wall to keep me from falling off the floor, I punched out my revisions, then collapsed in a drunken heap over my laptop. I never heard from the customer again, so I guess he was happy.
But me, I was a disaster.
I was a bum.
I was an empty husk.
I was a guy who had vomited somewhere in New York’s public transit matrix. And I knew I wasn’t the first. I was, more likely, now part of some grand Gotham tradition that dated to the earliest days of drunken, debauched, and vomitous trolley-dodging. But still, it didn’t feel right. Somebody had to clean that up.
I went back home and thought about how this asshole whose admissions essays I had just written was about to go to a big bright university while I sat in my dark little office with its exhaust-frosted windows and its stolen now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t, high-speed-my-ass wireless Internet. Working from home is great a lot of the time. I don’t envy the world its cubicles and Dilbert comics and traffic snarls and lunches at Applebee’s. But a normal human being could really lose some marbles working in isolation. I never painted a face on a volleyball with my own blood, but I definitely had the occasional conversation with Oscar Peterson or Sam Cooke or whichever other dead man happened to be coming through my stereo.
“Shake!”
“But Sam… somebody could be watching.”
“Shake!”
“Sam. I really shouldn’t.”
“Shake!”
“Well, jeez. There’s no need to yell.”
“Shake!”
“All right, all right. I’m doing it. I’m shaking.”
Now that Ethan was working outside the house and Bree wasn’t dropping by to visit me, I was cracking up.
And I was burning out… again.
But again, I was making loot. A pretty decent amount, really, and for the first time.
To be clear, this was not the kind of money that made my college education seem financially justified. But it was enough that I no longer felt absolutely certain that I’d have to sell a kidney to stay under a roof into the foreseeable future.
But in order to do something better than just stay afloat, I had to put in an amount of work that simply isn’t healthy. And I did this without end, without retreat, and without discretion. At times, my exhaustion teetered and toppled over into illness, my insomnia into somnambulant half consciousness, my ingenuity into automation. I pushed my body until the veins in my wrists palpitated visibly, until the lump on my neck bulged like a softball, until my lower back kinked like a tangled Slinky. I missed deadlines, I bargained for extensions, I promised to get my act together. Then I scarfed up more assignments, bigger, longer, more boring than ever, and did everything in my power to turn them into the money that would pay back my repeatedly defaulted student loans, that would keep the electricity on, that would get me questionable Mexican food for dinner.
But I was toast. My brain wanted to work, but my body was filled with bitter, rubbery resentment. It sagged and knotted and wished that my brain would just die and leave it alone. Eventually, my body would utterly refuse to go on and I would sleep. But every time I slept, I did it in guilt, with a deadline hanging over my head, an assignment passing its due time, frantic customer e-mails silently pelting my in-box while I cuddled with apnea and perspiration. And I’d wake up in mid-gallop, quaking with arrhythmia, confirming two more new assignments before my first cup of coffee was done brewing.
I was in a bad state. In what was becoming an annual tradition, I crashed. And in this year and all the years thereafter, when I crashed, I crashed hard, with fatigue and snotty colds and influenza and a seasonal hay fever death rattle.
I knew it was coming when I got fired one morning.
I don’t make any excuses for this stuff. I have always overbooked myself. I take on as much work as one human being possibly can. I don’t schedule carefully. I don’t look to see if I already have twenty pages due on a given date before taking on another fifteen-page paper. I just figure, we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. And cross it we do, half asleep at the wheel, a dozen weigh stations and twenty-five county lines till we can drop off the last load for the night.
In my time, I have missed many a deadline. I would have four, five, six, maybe seven deadlines a day during peak season, and I didn’t take the weekends off. I would’ve planned ahead, but ultimately I found it much more palatable simply to think about what was on tap for the next day. Had I tallied all of my deadlines for a month and counted the number of pages I had to write, I might’ve thrown myself from a tall building.
It served my psyche far better simply to take each day as its own distinct challenge. But of course it all blended together, so much so that on any given night, I might finish writing a five-page paper about the early history of the quadruple bypass and then immediately forget what it was about. When I prepared to upload the file for the customer, I would find myself racking my cloudy brain. Was he expecting a paper about setting personal goals for his future as a social worker, or one about McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklists? Whatever, let’s give him this one about Martin Luther. He’s probably not going to read it anyway.
And into this blurring spin cycle were always thrown I-forgot-to-add-the-fabric-softener-type moments: revision requests, requests for additional pages, last-minute rush assignments with rates simply too good to pass up. The schedule ahead always got thicker, the completion of my work in accordance with the dense cluster of deadlines ahead always seemingly less plausible.
And I had zero patience for the customers. I was curt, rude, and dismissive in e-mail correspondence. And eventually, I just started ignoring them altogether.
If a customer really annoyed me with impetuousness, with bratty rudeness, with brazen hostility, or even just with too many e-mails, I became as quiet as a tombstone.
I would just stop responding to e-mails. I’d complete the paper and submit it, but it would come with a cold shoulder. No polite customer service repartee and no apologies. When a client burned over the smoldering embers of panic, I fanned them with my silence.
It became a real hassle for Melissa, who was good-natured but had limits to how much crap she would take. It was her job to take orders, interact directly with customers, and function as a liaison to a team of writers. She was also responsible for mediating any conflicts between a writer and a client, determining whether a refund should be issued to a customer, and, eventually, firing me.
This time around, my termination came with a fantastic letter of condemnation. My employer said that at one time I had been an excellent writer, perhaps even “the best in the business.” But over the course of my employment, the quality of my work had declined significantly. I was turning in assignments later, receiving more revision requests, and generally failing to adhere to the high standards that the company maintained, indeed, the high standards that I had set for myself.
In my defense, the nature of the work itself is positively draining. After a couple of years solid, it can be difficult to stay on your game. Or maybe more accurately, I couldn’t manage my time well enough to stay on it. I had an obsessive-compulsive instinct. It told me that I always needed to have my next dozen or so paychecks lined up. Even in my sleep, the clock was ticking. I never punched out. The fear that there was no bottom, that everything could drop out from beneath me and I’d have nothing to stop my fall—that kept me in deadlines. And it pushed me to take on more than I could realistically handle in the time allotted. It was never for lack of trying. I would just pile it on. It was the only way to go from making some money to making more money. It was all a matter of volume. I had to find ways to cheat the number of hours in a day. So I did. I tricked the day into being twenty-four hours long.
I could always fool it for a while. But eventually, the day would catch up to me. It would strip me of my false credentials and cast me into sickness. I was almost relieved when I finally got fired. I had been with this company for a couple of years, but this had been coming for months now.
After no shortage of warnings that I had better straighten up and fly right, they told me that they regretted that it had come to this, but felt that it was probably for the best. They observed that I had burned out. I agreed with them. I asked for another chance. They declined and said that I probably needed a fresh start elsewhere.
They were right. I don’t take a lot of vacations. And even when I do, I usually carry my laptop with me. If I didn’t get fired once in a while, I’d never take any time off. I still had work with a few of the smaller, crappier, and less trustworthy companies, but nothing I could live on, really.
During this stretch of underemployment, I was struck by the disconcerting idea that perhaps it was time to look for a “real job.” And so I went on a few “real job” interviews. I interviewed for work as a copywriter for a nonprofit agency. I interviewed with a company that made juvenile reading-education software.
Ethan even scored me an interview with his Fortune 500 company. They were looking for another proposal writer. So I donned my cousin Marty’s secondhand suit and took a cab to the shiny glass towers downtown. I looked like a grifter wearing something he had won in a game of three-card monte.
I was more than qualified to do any of the jobs for which I interviewed. But I suspect that they could see through my feigned enthusiasm, through my threadbare suit, through my charade of acquiescence. I didn’t feel fit for this part of the world. Most of these people were actually impressed by my résumé, but none so much as the next paper-writing company down the line. I returned to the Coastal Carolina website that I had visited some years prior to procure the job I was now hoping to replace.
And, without formally identifying myself as a prior employee, I reached out to the same company that had fired me and, subsequently, Ethan just a few years back. They hired me back instantly. Either they never knew it was me, or they figured that even with my various faults, I was an asset to them. I completed a two-page test paper on constitutional law and I was back in the saddle. To this day, I have no idea if they remembered me from the first time around or not.
Fortunately, nobody checks references in this business. Chances are, if you approach a custom-paper-writing company and tell them you want to spend your days and nights writing academic essays for something between ten and twenty dollars a page, you have the ability to do the job. Nobody who couldn’t churn out pages by instinct would volunteer for this kind of personal hell. If you couldn’t do it, you wouldn’t even try.
And even if you did fake your way into the job, it wouldn’t be long before your limitations revealed themselves. It’s not like working in a corporation or going to school. There’s nothing to hide behind. Either the work gets done or it doesn’t.
I had one month off. A week after I returned to work, my schedule was as densely packed as ever. I had lost time to make up for. And I was feeling confident. I knew I had just been fired, but I felt like an NFL coach. This kind of thing just had to happen every couple of years. It was a necessary way of purging my fatigue, of gaining a new outlook, of starting out fresh.
And I needed that. And I needed a couple of interviews, too, just to look around at the kinds of places in which I might have found myself in an alternate dimension, to see the file cabinets and secretarial desks and people bustling around or hovering over one another and snorting about what had happened on Dancing with the Stars and Real Housewives of Wilmington, Delaware last night. That kind of stuff made me grateful that I at least had a choice.
And gratitude can be a tremendous motivator. This time, I was all in. No more screwing around.
A four-page paper on Transportation Security Administration regulations? Check.
A ten-pager on Turkey’s fight for independence? Sure.
A seven-page report on The Bridges of Madison County? Hmmmmm. Shit. I really didn’t want to know what that book was about. Oh well. Click.
Isaac Newton, Jesus Christ, J. M. Coetzee. Darwin’s theory of evolution, Erikson’s theory of stages, Piaget’s theory of genetic epistemology. Moses, Mohammed, Ming, and Marx. Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Kant, and Wundt. The British, the Ottoman, the Holy Roman, and the Mughal. The Crimean, the Trojan, the Peloponnesian, and the Hundred Years’. Cold wars, Star Wars, drug wars, terror wars. Nurse leadership, business leadership, military leadership. Group dynamics, independent learning styles, and the knowledge economy. Corporate ethics, corporate citizenship, corporate social responsibility. Scorsese, DeMille, Godard, and Coppola. Mozart, Dylan, Lennon, and Armstrong. Policy, legislation, constitution, scripture.
It got to where nobody would play Trivial Pursuit with me anymore.