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The drama occurred when a Rugby Union player, a fanatically amateur sport at the time, was within striking distance of winning the competition. He had to choose whether to take part in the football section or go for a different option that he stood a much poorer chance of scoring points in. If he took part in the five minutes of kicking a ball he would kiss goodbye to his amateur status, playing another sport alongside paid sportsmen was one thing, playing a game of football alongside professional sportsmen was the equivalent of buggering the Pope as far as The Rugby Football Union was concerned. If he kicked a ball his career would be over, he could never again play for England or his club, and any of his former team-mates who played against him would also be marked with the vile contagion of professionalism. This was crossing the Rubicon.

I know that he made that decision, he made that choice. I cannot remember if it paid off. I will never forget the lesson I learned that day. Turning professional is a one way trip. Once you cross that line everything becomes different. I recently stood poised on the brink of my own decision to turn professional. What would happen to me if I started to make money from doing this? I enjoy writing, far more than I enjoy anything I have ever been paid to do. Would being professional change this? Would it change me? Of course it would. It cannot help but change me.

I heard recently about a cheap and nasty piece of journalism. The Royal Mail has recently paid for a marketing company to come up with a new name, Consignia. The reason for this is quite simple, the new company wants to be a player on the world scene, not limited to one country or one activity. Perfectly understandable, naturally a new fluffy all-things-to-all-persons name is appropriate. So what do the tacky journalists do? Parade their lack of imagination and go for the cheap shots.

Journalists annoy me intensely at times. MPs are put in the unenviable position of having to be seen voting for their own pay increases, this never passes without cheap and nasty attacks from journalists. A large company is in the headlines for something and then announces its profit figures (which happens every three months) and lo and behold the large company generates large figures and so another story can be made from nothing. In the case of a telephone company, that charges by the second, this presents the perfect opportunity to divide those figures up and present them as so much profit or loss per second, again another cheap and nasty headline from nothing. Predictable and flabby journalism is deplorable.

Is there a wider problem with professionalism? At work my boss is always talking about being a professional retailer. Big bloody deal. Did I choose to be a professional retailer? I thought I had applied for a shop job. I see a distinction. Being a professional has two senses, a broad and weak sense which includes doing it for some reward and a narrower and more focused sense, doing it as your profession, deep at the heart of your identity. Life in a shop can be a pain at times, that's retail we are told. That's retail? Now that's show business is a phrase with meaning, but that's retail? Who are they trying to kid? Most people who work in shops do just that, they happen to work in a shop. Only a small minority are truly professional retailers.

Any shop manager who thinks he is heading up a team of professional retailers should seek psychiatric help. There is a well worn phrase that sums this up admirably, pay peanuts and you get monkeys. For people to truly aspire to professional standing you need to give them the full rewards. Professional status and a professional rewards structure. If you pay somebody by the hour and make them wear a polyester corporate uniform you will never get a professional employee. Professionalism implies taking the status of the job and fusing it with the status of the person. The worth of that person becomes measured by their professional competence. But if somebody is lowly paid and in charge of nobody, taking orders from everybody, subject to bag checks, made to wear their name on a badge do really think that such a person would want to associate his personality with such a “profession”? Do you think such a person feels like a professional?

It is very easy for a comfortable professional to ask somebody what they do. To a teacher or a lawyer that seems like an innocuous question. But to many people that is a barbed question. They are the only people. The people who are only shop workers or only typists. Such people do not identify themselves with their job, their job is just something that takes up part of their time. It is quite logical really, do you ever identify yourself as a person who sleeps? No. It is just something you do, not something you are.

If people do not receive sufficient status from their work they can never aspire to the commitment that an employer feels he has a right to expect. Behaviour employers put down to laziness in their employees can often be understood as an act of rebellion. People who make the transition from employed to self employed, in either direction, often take a while to adjust. I have done it both ways and it was hard either way to acclimatize to the different way of thinking. Doing a certain amount of work and then stopping because it was finished was strange at first, breaking the habit of seeing if a task could be stretched to the next break. After several years of self employment the idea of using something I owned to accomplish a task was so normal that it took a long time to break out of the habit and stop providing capital equipment now that I was but a poor proletarian wage slave. It is just a pen, I have a pen - No it's their job to provide pens, not yours.

I have made a decision not to become a professional after all. Not to seek to make money from my website at least. This is principally because I want to avoid being self employed again. I am not cut out for it, the forms and the discipline. I am quite good at getting stuff done if I want to do it, but not very good at doing stuff because I need to.

© 1999 - 2009 by Martin Willett.

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