There were 14 people in that room and 11 of us sold the same thing.
It was upstairs at a bar. A projector nobody switched on. Name tags with the coworking space's logo printed in the corner, and free beer for the first hour, paid for by the coworking space. I did not think about that detail at the time.
We went round the circle. 60 seconds each. A man by the door kept time on his phone and never once used it.
Websites. Words for websites. Ads pointing at the websites. A woman who did the same email work I did and did it better, which I knew about 20 seconds into her minute. Two men who called themselves agencies and had 1 person in them.
I went to rooms like that for 2 years. In some cities every week.
Nobody from any of them has ever paid me money.
I told people I was going for work. Contacts. Business. The polite word you use when you do not want to say the other one.
The other one is that it was Tuesday. I had not spoken to anybody since Sunday. Up those stairs was a room with the light on and people in it who knew what a late invoice feels like, and the first beer was free.
I do not think there is anything wrong with going for that. I just should not have written it down as work.
The arithmetic took me 2 years and it is not difficult.
Everybody in that room was looking for the same thing I was looking for. All of us had the same hole in the calendar. A room sorted by trade has no buyers in it.
Work does move sideways in there. I am not going to pretend it never happens. A man I met at one of those nights passed me 3 weeks of overflow he did not want, at a price he had already agreed with the client, minus his piece for handing it over. I took it. The work was fine. It was also the worst paid month I had that year, and I thanked him, because the other option was 3 empty weeks. That is what overflow is. Somebody else's price with a part removed, and it still beats nothing, which is why everyone takes it.
And there is always one person in the room who is not selling what the rest of us are selling. He is selling to the rest of us. Sometimes it is a course. Sometimes a service for freelancers. Sometimes it is the desks downstairs, and the free beer is a line in his budget for getting 14 of us up the stairs.
He is the only person in that building who walked in with a list of customers, and we were on it.
The street under that bar is where the money was. It took me a long time to look down.
I used the same laundry for 4 months in a town I stayed in too long. A shop about the width of a door and a half. Bags on a hanging scale. A fan pushing the smell of hot cotton out onto the pavement, all day, so you could find the place with your eyes shut. A woman around 60 ran it out of a school exercise book. Name, weight, price, date. My page said Andrew and then a word I never asked about.
The book was not her problem. The book was faster than anything I could have built her.
Her problem was the phone. People messaged all day asking if their bag was ready, and she had to stop, walk to the back, look, come back, type. Her daughter had a job somewhere else and answered the rest of them at 9 at night.
So I sat in a plastic chair in that shop one afternoon and made her a list on her phone that her daughter could tick from her own phone, and one saved message with the ticket number already in it. That is the entire build. About 4 hours, including the part where we could not get the daughter's account to work and I nearly gave up on it.
She tried to pay me in laundry. I said no. Then I said yes, because saying no twice would have been about me and not about her.
3 weeks after that I was in there dropping off a bag when a man came in, asked her something, and she pointed at me.
He had a guesthouse. 9 rooms, up the hill, mostly empty on weekdays.
He never asked me what I do. He asked whether I could stop 2 different platforms taking a cut of the same booking, which was not really the question, and we sat on the step outside for an hour working out what he actually wanted.
That turned into 5 months of work and it paid better than anything I had earned the year before. I priced the first part far too low and had to go back to him in month 2 and say so. I handled that conversation badly. He was decent about it and I have never enjoyed remembering it.
I moved the following year. I do not know whether the list is still running. Last time I passed through, the laundry was a phone accessory shop, which proves nothing on its own, because half that street turns over every couple of years anyway.
In the room upstairs the question is what do you do. I answered it maybe 200 times in 2 years, and I got good at it, and being good at it was worth nothing.
Nobody who has ever paid me has opened with that question. They open with a thing that is annoying them this month. The phone that never stops. The 2 platforms taking a bite out of the same booking. The bookings that arrive on paper and get lost.
You do not need a better answer for the room. You need to be standing somewhere the other question gets asked.
The bar is still there and the meetup still runs. First beer still free, and I know now which budget it comes out of.
Downstairs on the same street there is a dentist, a place that prints things while you wait, and a guesthouse with a sign that was up before I got here. All of them open. All of them with something annoying them this week.
None of them are coming up the stairs.
Andrew - No Refunds •••