Nobody Out Here Will Tell You Where The Money Comes From

It is not a lie and it is not an answer, and it ends the conversation, which is what it is for.

Somebody asks me what I do about once a week out here. In a kitchen. On a night bus with the air conditioning set to punishment. At a table where the beer goes warm because nobody is really drinking it. I say marketing, or I say I write things for other people's businesses, and then I ask them a question back before mine has landed properly.

I have been doing this for years. I am not the exception. Almost nobody answers.

Here is the full list of what people have told me they do, in 10 years.

Consulting. E-commerce. Online business. Something with property back home. I have a few things running.

None of those is a lie. None of them tells you anything either. You could hear all 5 in one evening and still not know whether the man across the table made 800 last month or 8,000.

The question keeps getting asked, though. It is the second thing anybody says to you out here, right after where are you from. And the more times I heard it go nowhere, the more I noticed that everyone at the table wanted the answer and nobody was going to be the one to give it.

Long stay place, low season, the sort of building where the corridor light is on a timer that is 4 seconds too short. The power went out around 9 and everybody drifted into the kitchen because that is where the window was. She was cutting a mango with the blunt house knife, working by the torch on her phone, propped against a jar.

She checked medical insurance claim forms for a company in Australia. She read what a doctor had written and marked whether it matched a code on a list. 6 years, same company. She had never met a single person she worked with. 2,300 US a month, paid on the 15th, and she said the number the way you tell somebody the time.

Then she said the part I still think about. She had no idea how she got it. A friend of her sister worked there and mentioned that they needed people. That was the whole story. There was nothing else in it.

She was worried about it going to somebody cheaper. She said that plainly too, and then we talked about the mango, which was not ripe.

She moved on a few weeks later. Penang or Ipoh, one of the two. I never heard from her again.

Small is easy to understand. Nobody wants to say 1,400 a month at a table where a man has just ordered a second bucket.

Lucky is the harder one. Almost every real answer out here has a piece of luck sitting in the middle of it. A sister's friend. An old boss who kept your number. A client from a job you had at 24 who changed companies twice and took you with him each time.

You cannot say that out loud without hearing how it sounds. It sounds like you did nothing. That is not true, but the true version is dull, and dull is worse than nothing at a table. You did the work, you did it on time, you did it for years, and one day the phone had a person on it who remembered.

There is a third reason and it is a fair one. If you have 3 clients, and you name the industry and the country and the rate, you have just told a table full of people who do exactly what you do where to stand.

The only people who will tell you in full detail how the money is made out here are the ones charging you to hear it. They have a number. They have a screenshot with the top of the browser cropped off. They have a first month, and a system with a name, and a story that runs in a straight line from broke to airport.

They answer the question nobody else answers, and they answer it in the shape you were hoping for. A method. Repeatable. Available from Tuesday.

Somebody arriving this year builds their entire picture of how this works from the one group of people with a financial reason to make it sound repeatable. Everyone else at the table said consulting and changed the subject.

I have watched people spend a year working from that picture. Not because they are stupid. Because it was the only detailed thing they were ever given.

I write emails and pages for small companies. Not big ones. The kind with fewer than 20 people, where the person who signs things also answers the phone.

Last year 3 clients paid for most of my life. One of them came to me through a woman who runs a laundry, which took about 4 hours of my time and a year of waiting. One I have had since 2019 and have never met, and every January I expect the message that starts with thank you for everything. The third hired me because I was the only person who replied on a public holiday.

Between 3,000 and 5,000 US a month when it is working. It has been 0 for a full month more than once. Twice it was 0 for 2 months. In the worst stretch I had under 900 left in the account, and I did not tell anybody that at the time either, which is the same silence I have been complaining about for the last 10 minutes.

Nothing much happened when I started saying it out loud. Nobody copied me. Nobody offered me work. One man at a table got noticeably quieter, and I think he had been rounding up for a while.

What it does is smaller than that, and slower. Somebody hears a real answer and stops looking around the room for the door with the light behind it. There is no door. There is a claim form, a code list, a friend of somebody's sister, and 6 years of doing it right.

The true answers are all boring. That is the useful part.

Andrew - No Refunds •••