After dodging work for 5 years at universities, choosing the longest courses I could find without getting sucked onto the arcane path to becoming a professor, I spent all my savings on a one-man Sahara crossing by motorbike. It was like a personal Paris-Dakar rally, only without the pace, press or people. The name of the game was getting away from people and things, and I was surprised at just how many people there are in the Sahara but that’s another story.
Post-desert and penniless, I did the decent thing that any well educated middle-class person would do. I moved in with my mother, and went on the dole. In these circumstances work dodging was suddenly less appealing, and I was spurred into getting a job with a software and consulting company in London. It was “in London” in only the loosest sense of the phrase – at the very end of the Metropolitan line.
What I found incredible about being a “consultant” is that with little or no real experience – maybe a year – I was sent out to the corners of England, often on my own, and I was telling international banks how to build software.
To my mind, I could barely program yet people were paying 600-700 pounds a day for my advice . I thought this was ridiculous and asked my boss why I was worth a thousand dollars a day, whereas he was worth $1400 a day, with a decade of experience. The answer I got back was so unconvincing that I don’t even remember it. Something to do with diminishing returns.
Once, I had a week to write a report about something I’d already done. Counting the words and doing some mental arithmetic, I realized that a short word like “a”, “the”, “and” was costing the client about a pound. The other thing I realized was that there was a huge differential between what I was earning my company and what my company was paying me.
The company was called MSW after the owners, though we called it Mostly Sad er, Windowcleaners, to keep it clean. I worked there for two years to the day, and left to join a start-up and fiddle around with the internet.