Where It All Began: Part 3 - I don't want to be a photographer anymore!
Well then, what now?
So after two years of carrying a camera around Kenya and three further years studying photography I made a crucial life decision - I did not want to be a photographer anymore.
I had spent the last three years in Cornwall studying an incredibly niche course - Marine and Natural History Photography - and there was only one industry a degree like this opens doors to, behind which none of the roles require suits and even fewer pay well.
As a result I was at an impasse. There are no grad schemes or internships available in almost all creative industries, but particularly photography, so I and my fellow contemporaries were spat out of Cornwall in the early summer of 2017 with no prospects other than the CV’s we’d been instructed to put together and a couple of contacts in our back pockets that our lecturers had passed on. So entrenched had I become in my view that I no longer wanted to be a photographer than for our final year show I was the only student out of 65 not to create an image portfolio or short film. Instead I built a prototype for a conservation based app that harnessed Netflix style subscriptions to generate increased funding for conservation projects by offering greater communication between them and their donors. Effectively a social media for conservation. So while my contemporaries at least left with an image portfolio or film under their belt, I didn’t even have that. So I got a job as a tree surgeons assistant.
An Aspiring Tree Hugger
This meant the long, sunny summer of 2017 - post Brexit but pre Trump - became my own Truman Show. Every day at 6am my alarm clock would lose the race with the gap in my curtains to be the first to wake me up, I’d hurry down soft scrambled eggs with a heavy black coffee at 6.15 and be in the yard for 7am where Reece and Tom - the two actual tree surgeons - would let me know what the job was that day, what we needed to load up and then we’d be on the road again by 7.30. The jobs were usually always interesting and we’d be back in the yard by 4pm, clocked off by 4.15 and I was on the golf course by 4.30. Every. Single Day. Returning home at 9pm for pasta, a wash and bed, ready to do start the process all over again in a few hours time.
For a few months this kept me perfectly content. I was saving some money (while emptying my parents fridge on a bi-weekly basis) but I knew that it could not last. As the long, hot summer evenings started to retire for the season, replaced by those temperamental spurs of autumn that pull the leaves from the trees and shroud both dawn and dusk in a veil of grey, my job started to become fairly miserable.
Gone were the drives to work at sunrise, the same playlist on every morning as I new that my favourite song at the time (Tom Misch, Man Like You) would begin as I came over the top of Win Green, the highest point in South West England, and dawn broke over the border between Dorset and Wiltshire. My evening rounds of golf had dropped from 18 holes to six to none, and I knew it was only a matter of time until I would wake up, drive to work in the dark, work in the rain and then drive home in the dark again.
Snakes or Ladders?
While I was pondering this my friends were choosing one of two paths - join the London snakes and ladders board or travel. Most chose option one, running around in search of their first ladder - typically an internship - and trying not to mess it up and slide down a snake back to square one again. Others had their sights on life further afield and Instagram stories kept appearing of friends on beaches or in bars, while the rest of us were reluctantly introduced to the humdrum rhythms of the tube sandwiched nine-to-five.
One such friend was my old university hockey team mate, Dan. A man famous for running on in his debut match without a hockey stick. Such was the calibre of sport at an art college. Three years down the line though he had just been offered an internship in Sydney, Australia and, thanks to the time difference we would always catch up at 7am my time, 5pm his. I was driving to work in the rain, he was on the beach with a beer. He was tanned and smiling, I had just left my coffee on the roof of my car in the dark and only realised when it started spilling down my window. I wanted to be Dan.
“Mate,” (he now started all sentences as if a Down Under native) “you could earn so much more money working for a tree surgeon down here. Plus the weather is better. Also the Ashes are in a couple of months.”
I don’t think Dan thought too much of this throw away comment. He thought even less of me saying, “Sure okay, sounds great. I’ll come down.” It wasn’t until I send him a screenshot of my flight details three days later that he took me seriously. Because Dan had been right, I was earning £55 a day, the weather sucked and as an avid cricket fan the thought of watching England try and regain the urn in Australia was tantalising. How could I not go.
Sydney, then?
With notice handed in - all be it in the (almost) most easily replaceable role I’ve ever had - I packed some swimmers and flip flops in to a rucksack and headed off to find Dan.
Some friends in Manly had very kindly agreed to put me up while we found a place to live and even sorted me with a job for a tree surgeon there. I was now an international tree surgeons assistant. Thank god for the three year, £30,000 degree.
On my first day my new boss turned up in low slung jeans, no pants and a toothbrush in his back pocket. Unsure what he was about to clean with it I was equal parts surprised and relieved when he started brushing his teeth, all be it while briefing the client on the limbs we were about to chop off their beloved Bottlebrush tree. He had the grace to wait for the client to go back inside until spitting toothpaste on their drive, gave us a couple of instructions then sat on the wall and watched the tree, perhaps willing the branch to fall down on its own accord so he wouldn’t have to pay us to do it. This was day one.
Day two was cancelled - it was too hot.
I had moved to Sydney on the eve of summer, one that would eventually end up so hot Joe Root, England’s finest, would get heat exhaustion trying to bat to save some English pride in an Ashes annihilation just five weeks later. On my second day in the country the thermostat his 36 degrees and in Sydney labour law all manual labour must stop when the temperature exceeds 32. So I had an unpaid day off.
I met Dan for a few beers and some chicken wings in a bar on Bondi Beach - did I mention we were tourists? - and I realised that I did not want to be a tree surgeon anymore. I wanted to drink beer and eat chicken wings on Bondi Beach. Every day. So I bailed on the toothbrush carrying, tree staring tree surgeon and started looking for a new job.
Four Red Flags
I’m unsure how I went from that decision to my next one, perhaps too many meetings with Dan on the beach, but I moved out of the Caleo’s beautiful home in Manly for a crappy flat in Ranly that Dan and rented for a month off a couple who were heading back to England. Christmas was fast approaching, rent was expensive and I needed a job, so I applied for all those available to anyone on a working visa - bar work, marquee rigging or door to door sales. In that order of preference.
I had zero bar work experience. Marquee rigging, it turned out, was going to be a big part of my future but not in Australia, so the only interview I got was with a company who ‘raised vital charitable funding through one-to-one campaigning.’ - They knocked on doors and asked people for money.
The interview went well, I got the job and so we celebrated on Bondi Beach with chicken wings and beer. I started the very next day, along side 20 other successful applicants and so made sure to turn up 10 minutes early.
The office building was in a back suburb of Sydney and needed some serious TLC. Paint peeled off the frame around the door, its original colour utterly unrecognisable and the sign that must have once told you where you were unfortunate enough to be was long gone, the only remnants a faded rectangle where the paint was almost still visible. A small oasis amongst a concrete drought.
Everyone else that turned up was in a lime green shirt with the name of a well known conservation charity on the back. I was excited by this as while I may not have been interested in photography anymore, wildlife still held a candle to my heart. My manager turned up not long after me and bought the new recruits up two flights of stairs, lined with drooping, faded motivational posters that let us know how ready we must all be to seize the moment and live the day to its max. Red flag number one.
We were shown in to a room at the top of the building that we heard long before we saw. Music blared out from tinny speakers and all the lime green shirts were shouting at each other over the music. “They’re practicing their pitches”, we were told, ready to be deployed on some poor stranger later that day.
It had just turned 11:30, our contract stated we got paid from 13:00, so I assumed everyone here was new and we were all being trained and would probably get an early finish as we were supposed to be working till 19:00. Red flag number two.
We were each given a sheet with three paragraphs of huge text and told this was our new bible - our sales pitch. We each had a few minutes to memorise it then choose a partner and start rehearsing to one another over the music.
It turned out the music was quite an effective tool in helping us to annunciate and the pitch was fairly simple so none of this was too tricky, aside from the fact I suffered from typical British embarrassment which the Swedish girl I was partnered with certainly did not suffer from. There was a gulf in quality immediately.
My manager’s manager then called us all together, sat us on the floor like school children at assembly and asked all the new team members to stand up and tell their most embarrassing story. I ignored the temptation to say “this”, made up some tale that was obviously a lie and sat back down on the floor again. Red flag number three.
On the wall behind us were twenty lime green balloons. My manager’s manager read out the three top ‘fundraisers’ (see; salesperson) from the previous day and each got to pop a balloon. Within each was a piece of paper with a reward written on them - free case of beer, free box of wine, tickets to a nightclub - and we all cheered when they read out their utterly crap prize.
This all took an hour and after that we were deployed to our patch - an outer Sydney suburb, usually around the Blue Mountains - and told do go do our thing. Our manager would accompany us for the first part of the day to check we were not incompetent and then left us to our own devices. We were getting paid a flat rate of AUS$25 an hour (US16/ £12.50) and there were commission bands depending on how many people per week we convinced to sign up to a monthly direct debit of AUS$50, promising them they were helping to save the Great Barrier Reef. Once you got past four in a week you were in bonus territory.
On my first day I got two sign ups and a lot of ‘go aways’. Most people never answered their door. At 19:00 we met back at the van and were driven an hour back to the office and allowed to go home from there. I’d been at work from 11:30 - 20:00. I’d been paid from 13:00 - 19:00. Red flag number four. And this one was flapping pretty hard in the wind.
The World's Best Worst Job
For a fortnight I thought this was going to be okay. The pay was good enough to pay for most of my daily bar tabs and actually the hours meant I was spending more time at the beach in the morning than the evening, a considerably cheaper alternative. Most did not stay in the job more than a couple of days so once I had made it past the two week mark I was offered the role of team manager. This came with a considerable pay rise and better potential ‘incentives’ - the more employees I raised up to team manager level the more money I could make.
While it is probably very clear to you that this was a pyramid scheme I had walked in to, I was being pretty slow on the uptake. I verbally accepted the manager role, waited for the paperwork to come through and continued to spend hours a day knocking on strangers door’s.
We were paid weekly and I in each week I had been there had hit the first band of sales commission, which would almost double my weekly salary. Every time the pay cheque came in though there was never any commission. I flagged this and was told that, somehow, there was always just enough people that cancelled their direct debit to ensure I was always one sale below the commission mark. As we had no access to this information I could never verify if this was true or not. I just had to accept it. So I stopped knocking on strangers door’s.
Every day when I was dropped on my patch I would find a park, pull out my kindle and read a book. My manager would be prowling the area making sure we were knocking on doors, and if she ever rang it was stated in my contract that I had to answer but leave her on speaker if I was with a customer. Every time she called I would say I was walking between houses, then fill in some random information on my work sheet (number 85: didn’t answer. number 87: not interested) and return to my book. I was being paid to read. Suddenly the worst job ever became the best gig in town.
How To Quit and Get Fired From The Same Job
But it could not last. Eventually the time came to sign the paperwork and move up the pyramid, but I said no. In fact I just completely skipped the meeting I was meant to have come to before work and turned up as normal (still one and a half hours before we got paid). Another gem in the contract was you had to give a weeks notice or you would be fined $125 from your final pay cheque, and if you did not return the charity t-shirt and cap you had been given then that was another $25 each.
So I handed in my notice to my manager, told her I (and many others) hated the job and felt we were being badly treated, working over 10 hours per week that we were not paid for. She told her manager, who told his manager and I was summoned to see my manager’s manager’s manager in the downstairs office. In the month I had been there the company had moved from the crappy downtown offering to a new, plush office block in central Sydney and the man who lived at the top of the pyramid was waiting for me in a high backed desk chair, hair plastered to his scalp in a bid to cover the glaring, sweaty gaps with pin strips trousers and a black gilet over a white t-shirt. He looked like a twat.
He also spoke like one.
Like me he was English but that was where the similarities ended. His accent sounded like an Australian trying to do an impression of a cockney accent from the 1980’s, while an elephant trod on his toe. As far as I can gather his business plan looked something like this: Reach out to a well known charity and promise them a certain amount of fund raising each month so that in exchange he could put their brand on t-shirts and caps. Then, exclusively employ foreign travellers who are unlikely to be in town for very long, pay them terribly and never give them their commission in the knowledge they have no way of proving you wrong. Finally, take 60% of all the monthly direct debits those kind souls we convinced to sign up to support a charity were paying and drive your convertible Mercedes around Sydney harbour. Like I say, twat.
He asked me why I was leaving. I told him it was a terrible place to work and many others upstairs thought the same. So he fired me. Sparing me my seven days notice and surely making me one of the few people in the world to have been fired the day they resigned. You’ll be unsurprised to hear pyramid schemes don’t offer severance packages.
This meant that within two months of arriving in Sydney I’d burned through two jobs as well as a lot of cash and had just signed on to a one year lease for a three bed apartment in Rose Bay, having just done the Dan treatment on our friend Luke and convinced him to move out as well.
Looking back on it now I think this was the lowest I’ve felt in the last decade, despite actually being pretty happy. I hated not having the purpose of a fulfilling job and was coming round to the realisation that actually, maybe I was quite keen to be a photographer after all. I had seen the other side of the coin and I didn’t much care for it. So I moved back to the U.K.
I arrived back in England in February, having only left in October. It had been raining when I left and it was raining when I arrived, proving my little interlude utterly irrelevant in the world’s plans but with huge bearing on my own life. I knew now that I wanted to be a photographer but there were just two obstacles in my way. Firstly, I had no camera kit, a slight hitch. But worse still I couldn’t buy any because I was in an enormous pile of debt that smelt remarkably like chicken wings and beer.
