I started working 10 years ago today. Or, at least, this Monday of the month 10 years ago.
It all started with a football match and probably some beer and ended up with me and a friend named Gareth walking up Liverpool Road to an interview at something called a "new media" company. Which sounded terribly Wired.
This was back when Wired was still very, very cool. Especially if, like me, you were arse deep in a course at Imperial College - the UK equivalent of MIT but with, if it's possible, even fewer women. Staring down the barrel of a job in investment banking, IT consulting or something in the vague but yet horrific-on-a-Lovecraftian-scale world of Java B2B I was rapidly starting to fear that the jig was up and that I was sometime soon I was going to be exposed as a consumate slacker.
Walking in front of us was quite possibly the most beautiful woman I had ever seen - poised, ethereal and, I swear to god, glowing. I was completely smitten.
She turned out to be Fiona Brice and she was the office manager for the rather generically named New Media Com.
Remember that all interviews I had up until this point were in typical corporate offices - bad carpet, ceiling tiles, harsh overhead lights and cubicles as far as the eye could see - stuffed with stressed looking people in bad suits.
Therefore the New Media Com offices came as a bit of a shock.
The floor was polished hard wood and all the light came from a floor to ceiling patio windows with organicly shaped window panes. Since then it's been turned into a rather hip dance studio
And the people! Young. Good looking. Not a single one of them wearing a Iron Maiden tshirt over old school trousers, their pasty white faces framed by oversized glasses and lank, greasy hair. Oh how I longed to be like them!
And the detail I remember most was that it was the first time I heard "Teardrop"
Again, remember every other place I'd interviewed until then (one of which had made it very clear to me that even listenting to music via headphones was banned) and then imagine being in this amazing space with the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen (and who was offering us coffee like we were actual real people rather than rather dodgy chancers on the blag), hip young people with an air of quiet confidence and this achingly, achingly beautiful song.
Rather suprisingly they hired the both of us as employees number 9 and 10. It soon transpired that they were blagging it as much as we were.
No-one new anything about new-media back in 1998 - you made it up as you went along and if it worked then you pretended that you'd known it would all along and if it failed you came up with an excuse on the fly and lied until you almost believed it yourself.
During the boom I hired everyone I knew and
Profero, as it was soon renamed (the name being chosen, literally, by thumbing through my old Latin GCSE dictionary until we found a word we liked) started doing much actual, real, important campaigns such as Sky Digital and CNN. I tried my hand at everything - there's an old joke that goes "Can you play the piano?", "I don't know, I've never tried" and I was 20 years old and some combination of fear of being found out and youthful arrogance meant that I'd give
anything a go - build a website for Miss World including a voting script in a weekend? No problem - the team came in on Monday morning to find me asleep on my keyboard. Client wants a promotional screen saver? Of course. I've never written one before but how hard can it be?
I worked there for over 2 years, juggling college work and usually 3 days in the office a week. Profero survived the bust that afflicted many of the bigger, trendier agencies out there and now has 12 offices from London to Madrid to Sydney, Singapore, Shanghai and, as of this year, New York. The last friend I hired (who came in to do 2 days of HTML work 9 years ago and forgot to leave) finally quit - albeit to work for one of the original 9 employees.
Gareth's doing clever things with television in Australia and I'm here in San Francisco with a CV that once caused someone to remark that it reminded them that "... career was a verb as well as a noun".
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