I’ve rarely run into another freelancer and haven’t much wanted to. For the sake of my nerves and to keep paranoia in check, I always preferred to fantasize that I was the only one. Sometimes I was able to convince myself. During an ME’s retirement gathering, it finally happened. I was circulating among the MEs and AEs – that ones who, you know, can assign me mscripts – when the retiring ME called out, “Will all my freelancers come join me up here?” There ended the fantasy. So we all made our way to the front of the hall. “There they are,” I thought. “So that’s what they look like.” It was a flock of five middle-aged women in sensible shoes and workaday dresses and with the same owlish blink in their eyes – presumably, from staring hard at a laptop screen all day. I was the only guy. We all looked around at each other, while the ME gave a brief and gracious speech thanking us for all the work we’d done for her over the years. Then we looked at each other some more, and then one of them asked, “So you’ve always worked for A–––]?” A lot of the time, I told them – they’d gathered around me by then – but I’d worked for the others, too (there were five other MEs at that house). “What, the others?,” they asked, almost in unison. “How did you meet them?” I just came up and said hello, I told them, watching their paranoia take a grip. How often did I work for this one, and that other one? What kinds of mscripts? They’d never spread themselves out, not even within the same company. Right there, in the hallway at this press, were five offices in a row (no cubicles back then), senior ME, ME, Senior ME, ME, ME. They hadn’t taken three steps in either direction to introduce themselves.
I was aghast – how could they not? That was always my method for keeping worries in check — to spread myself out as much as I could, within one company, and across companies. That was easy enough when the targets were within the same house – “Hi there, you’re J—, right? – I handle some mscripts for F—” – but harder when I was approaching clients cold, though it turned out those MEs usually knew the people I’d worked with at other houses. They know [of] each other.
I live on a very beautiful street, lucky me – downtown west side, towering silver maple canopy, redbrick Victorian, close to shops and restaurants and parks and cultural venues. The basement never floods (we’re on a hill), the roof never leaks (there are a lot of old-school tradesmen in the neighbourhood). It wasn’t all of that when we first moved here, but it is now. The real estate map has notched us up a couple of times since then – we’re considered Trinity-Bellwoods now. Basically, it’s every middle-aged semi-creative middle-class toiler’s dream fantasy, and we’re living it. When we first moved in, 23 years ago, and we went for a walk around the nearest blocks, just to greet our new lives, and we turned the nearest corner, oh my, there was Chuck. We would have Chuck for a neighbour. “Look there,” I told my wife. Chuck the senior FEAC member, FEAC (now EAC) being the gatekeeper for a lot of publishing houses in the city. I’d been a member for the first two or three years when I started out, but let my membership lapse when I found that it wasn’t helping me find clients – if anything, my presence at those meetings was locking me out. But I do remember Chuck, who was quite senior in the group. That’s how the long-timers referred to themselves, “senior FEAC members,” though that term wasn’t part of any policy except their own.
Years go by, and Chuck and I are neighbours. I had little need to network much by then –I was well mobbed up at several major houses by then, and doing very well – but I remembered him, and it turns out he remembered me. We never talked shop, never had to, never discussed business or swapped client lists. I was avoiding him even then.
But one day he stopped avoiding me, in fact he was eager to Develop a Relationship. It was embarrassing for us both. He was suddenly eager to pitch himself to me, and along the way, I learned what his actual career had been. He’d worked in-house for decades at a textbook house, but solely on contract, handling the same line of books. Then the company had dropped that line, so, belly up for him. That had been his career, which had included no outreach until now. I wondered why he had ever called himself a freelancer when he was in effect a contract worker. When I crossed the street to avoid him, he’d cross it to join me and begin pitching himself. He sounded like what I must have sounded like when I first started out, and he had the same look of poorly masked desperation whenever he managed to corral me. I confess that I gloated whenever I managed to extricate myself. I remembered what a hard scramble it had been, for years, to establish a career in this field. He hadn’t helped me back then, so now let him go through it too.
I have helped people from time to time, as a way to pay my luck forward, but it has always been for CEs I already had some reason to trust or were friends of people I trusted. When I retired, I contacted a few MEs I’d worked with about people whom I knew were available and experienced and looking for work, but I don’t know how that panned out. I’m happily out of the game, though everyone is on my email list for this blog.
You don’t know what you don’t know
Blind spots can be embarrassing, and I expect everyone has them, till they’re pointed out. I misspelled hypocrisy for years before someone pointed it out to me. No, it doesn’t mean rule by hippos. Thank heaven you don’t much encounter that word.