I used to know what it meant to be a professional. In my former incarnation as a graphic designer and art director, I had some inkling about what work ethic and professionalism was. I traded in my last full-time for a gig economy job in 2016. By then, I was two books into the Rational Male series and doing the groundwork for my third. Being an author was still something of a novelty, but I was beginning to see how being a full-time author was preferable to dealing with petty dictator bosses and unruly clients.
Bad as the low-brow bosses were, the unruly clients in my gig economy life convinced me to go full-time with my writing. When you work in a design agency, there is a degree of insulation between a “creative” and the client who hopes your creativity will make them money. They’re hoping you can guarantee them a return on investment. Most of my work was in the casino gaming and wine and spirits industries, which were a natural fit for me, but between myself and the actual employer (or client), there was a bureaucracy of salesmen, PR people, ad managers, purchasers, compliance people, and ad reps. Whenever a creative did anything, his genius was never performed just for the client – it was performed for the approval of a panoply of middlemen who all thought they would’ve done it much better themselves.
As odd as it sounds, approval by a committee was preferable to having to deal with clients as a hired gun in the gig economy. You see, that bureaucracy also served as a buffer for what, in the 20th century, used to be known as work ethic and professionalism. Whenever I think of the term professionalism, I think of my codgery friend Aaron Clarey complaining about some cashier or barista at Starbucks who didn’t leave him room for cream in his coffee or some trivial shit. But trivial shit adds up. It’s not that a lack of professionalism is so notable in any one instance; it’s that the lack is so predictable over hundreds, thousands, of instances. It sounds like a Boomer, Xer, or even Millennial thing to say, but people nowadays don’t know the meaning of professionalism. And work ethic sounds like some qualifying shame tactic your shit-face boss says to make the slaves compete against each other to pick the most cotton.
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