Chapter 11
Believing an education was the best way to succeed and avoid horrible jobs, I enrolled in a Bachelor of Media Arts majoring in photography.
And because I was smart, realistic and going places, I realised I needed work experience while studying. I would have to do a few lowly crappy part-time jobs before I hit the big time.
If you know the kind of place that takes photographs of babies in baskets in front of pastel airbrushed backdrops and uses a soft focus lens like it’s still the nineteen-eighties, then you might know Photography Productions. It was located on the top floor of a department store called Anthony’s.
As a Photography Productions sales person, I wandered the department store holding a baby-in-a-basket photo sneaking up on mothers in the 0-to-3-year-old section convincing them to take up our amazing no-obligation offer of a photograph of their child for just five dollars.
At first I had a lot of success. I was a natural. I would accost a mother looking through stretch-n-grows and tell her she could have a portrait of her baby in a ten by twelve photograph like the example in my hand and smile awkwardly hoping she couldn’t smell my alcohol-breath because by this time, as a first-year student, my life was all about partying.
“The photographer,” I would tell the hapless mother, “will take a few different photographs of your baby but you are not obliged to buy them.” I said this last part as if the mother and I would scam the company together. The mother would agree and I would book a time on my clipboard then move to the next mother who believed their child was worthy of a photograph. All the mothers were suckers. I simply had to compliment their baby that looked like every other baby I had ever seen, and they were putty in my hands.
The photographer herself was enough to disenchant any budding photographer. She looked exactly like one of the mums: slightly overweight, smart-casual clothing that covered the bumps and about thirty years old. Margaret, the photographer, made extreme happy faces and blew raspberries at the babies from behind the camera. I was instantly disillusioned. In my mind, photographers were creative and curious types interested in recording the world, not robots churning out the same awful photo over and over again. After my first shift at Photography Productions, I was starting to lose the faith.
I thought I was a pretty good salesperson until two months later the owner pushed me to sell harder.
The owner was the opposite of Margaret. Lynette was a short quiet dark-haired woman who lurked around the place and said little. She lurked behind Margaret in the studio, lurked behind me lurking behind mothers in the kids-wear department and she had empty eyes, the eyes of someone who had lost their baby.
By this stage in my life I was either drunk or high or both on a Friday and Saturday night; partying was my priority and no job was going to impact on my busy schedule. But cracks were forming.
I remember wandering into the bedding department, sitting on a display bed with the clipboard clutched to my chest, and feeling I might vomit on the duvet set. Another morning I had endless trouble walking the narrow vinyl polished aisles, leaning to the left and walking on a visible angle, the clothes racks were closing in on me. I was sure everyone was staring at me and reading my thoughts. They knew I didn’t like babies.
Having enough of Photography Productions was a combination of things. I had grown tired of the constant hangovers and pressure-selling guilt, and when the owner used her dark forces to push me into her office for telemarketing duties, I knew it was time to leave.
Those who had already taken up the no-obligation five-dollar offer – and been pressured into buying additional higher-priced photos at the “viewing” after having their oxytocin levels exploited from seeing their baby replicated twenty times in photographs displayed in frames on a wall – received a phone call a year later asking if their irresistible little cutie-pie treasures had grown more beautiful and needed to be captured using the professional services of Photography Productions.
The mothers were not receptive to my phone call.
I’ve heard every no is closer to a yes but in my telemarketing experience, every no is closer to another no.
I was eighteen years old, had moved out of home and, with two years of study ahead of me, needed the cash.
But I could no longer face the job, so quit.
I lasted three months.
Rather than take a you-want-fries-with-that or that-looks-great-on-you job in retail, I opted for no job, and to save money my partner Ellie and I shared a room in a flat and fine-tuned our budget.
Instead of drinking KGBs – a premixed vodka and lemonade beverage popular at the time – we invented KGGs, a premixed drink with a meaningless acronym based on the authentic and more palatable KGB.
A KGG was the cheapest fourteen-dollars-per-bottle gin, grapefruit and lemons squeezed from our garden fruit trees, plus cups of sugar. KGGs got us drunk Friday and Saturday nights and, at three dollars fifty each per night, this was seven dollars each per weekend for alcohol. An overall win but still a significant percentage of our food budget of twenty-five dollars each per week.
My tertiary education was teaching me the power of budgeting and how to “work smarter, not harder.”
I decided to never again work a demeaning job. By quitting Photography Productions I had reclaimed my dignity and left myself open to better work opportunities.