That time I lost my dream job

A slow news car crash

The news broke — as all bad news surely will one day — on a terrapin. There was a list of names dotted around an amphibious reptile shell, spelling out where everyone now worked following the restructuring. And mine was headlined ‘social’.

Which was odd for a couple of reasons. First, given 50 adjectives with which to describe me, I’m confident that few would select that word unless under duress. And second, this was definitely not the role I was hired to do a year earlier. Sure, the Treasury wasn’t exactly my Graceland, but I’m fairly certain I didn’t leave it to draft tweets for a living.

Now, I owe a lot to the place and to the people there, who took a chance on me when they had no earthly reason to do so. Without them, I’d never have got to do any of the incredible things of the last few years. There would have been no move to the Evening Standard, no West End Final newsletter and certainly no Lines To Take.

Also, real talk. I was a hopeless employee that first year. In my defence, this was compounded by a near total absence of support that someone changing industries might expect. Still, I can hardly blame the transfer committee for looking at me and having second thoughts about their recruitment strategy.

So, yes, this is a story about scar tissue and that sinking feeling but also the trust that, though things may be bad — and indeed getting worse — that doesn’t preclude the possibility of something turning up.

“Don’t drop the ball”

It might have been, well, not ok, I was in shock that I’d been shunted out of journalism and into social media. But it would have been manageable if the pandemic hadn’t sent the jobs market into reverse, or the thoroughly charming head of social hadn’t left to be replaced by someone with the emotional intelligence of a Ford Cortina.

We were set heroically optimistic targets and when they weren’t met, it was our fault. Initiative was frowned upon; doing any journalism was treated as an act of sedition. We’d be told to post less — quality over quantity, y’know — then admonished when the numbers fell. And feedback could be reduced to “work harder,” texted on days off. Can you sense my teeth grinding through your inbox?

This was compounded by the fact that, in external meetings, I was still being introduced as “Jack, who we hired from the Treasury.” I always wanted to interject with “Who you then extradited into social media, despite him lacking any relevant skills” but I was too distracted by Slack messages from my line manager demanding I send social assets I’d already emailed over.

Don’t get me wrong, social media promotion is very important! I do it for this newsletter. And we are more than a decade removed from major corporations asking the intern to come up with some tweets. It just wasn’t the dream job I’d had just months earlier.

After further pandemic related shenanigans, I left to join the Standard as a leader writer, but oh boy, that scar tissue. It meant that a few months later, when the editor asked me to take over West End Final, the paper’s daily newsletter, I was aghast. Was a job that I enjoyed being taken away from me again? The newsletter was basically just links to assorted news stories. What the heck could I do with that?

It turns out I was afforded a frankly unwise degree of freedom to do what I wanted, quietly burrowing away in my corner of the office, or at home, or just off the City Airport Pret, coming out with ever-more obscure 1990s cultural references with which to contextualise the latest convulsions in great power competition and political scandals.

And when my time at the Standard had come to a natural end, I had developed a small but distinct brand, built up a loyal following, without which I’d never have been able to launch Lines To Take.

Years ago, I recall reading an interview with Guillem Balagué, the UK-based Spanish football journalist. He was asked how he got into it and his answer was basically: dumb luck. Or at least, hard work and a lot of happenstance.

So, I try to remind myself to enjoy the good times, to expect change, but not for that change to resemble what came before. As mindset shifts go, it’s a work in progress.