MY OTHER LIFE:In our continuing series – in which Irish Times writers consider their alternative lives – CONOR POPErecalls his brief career in insurance, and wonders where he might be now if he'd stuck with it
IT STILL terrifies me sometimes how my life path was determined by a a couple of spur-of-the-moment decisions.
In the summer of 1991, I’d just finished my finals in University College Galway (UCG), where years of smoking, drinking vile coffee and talking to girls instead of studying left me with a a poor degree in English and Philosophy.
Remarkably, there was no work for indolent philosophers in the west of Ireland and my dream of drumming in an indie rock band wasn’t looking good either, so I nodded glumly when my dad offered to get me a summer job in the Dublin office of the insurance company where he worked.
A friend from Galway who’d already moved to Dublin found me the worst bedsit in Ranelagh. The carpets and bed smelled like kitty litter, the toilet worked only sporadically and the kitchen was a camping stove and cooler box.
On the first day, as I donned my cheap suit, I felt like I was getting ready for a fancy dress party and, when I arrived at the office, I half expected people to admire my costume. They didn’t and instead I was pointed towards the claims department where I would spend my summer.
I had two tasks: photocopying and filing. If four years of university had taught me nothing else – and they hadn’t – I’d learned how to photocopy, other people’s notes mostly. But when it came to filing, I was like an illiterate, thumbless man. It pains me now, given the job I do, to think how many consumers’ claims were delayed or never acted upon because of my many screw-ups.
When I wasn’t photocopying or filing, I pored over the company’s records, marvelling at the lengths it went to to avoid pay-outs.
I remember one chap who was claiming large damages after apparently sustaining a serious back injury in a car accident. He could barely walk, never mind work, or so he said. The company wasn’t buying it and employed a team of private investigators to stalk him for weeks.
Eventually they got the money shot: him on a football pitch, soaring above the opposition and heading a glorious goal past a flailing goalkeeper. The next page was stamped “claim dropped”.
Reading about the misfortunes of others was my only diversion. I struggled to make friends, maybe because I was the new boy or maybe because I was so useless at filing. Whatever the reason, it was a lonely time. I would work, then walk home to feast on Easi-singles sandwiches.
University was an egalitarian place where men and women mingled freely but in this workplace, there was a clear and absurd divide between the sexes. During our breaks, the women sat at certain tables, the men at others and the managers, all men, at another. It was beyond depressing.
The months passed and in September, after my photocopying skills had clearly been recognised and my filing failures overlooked, I was offered an extension.
It wasn’t a permanent position, I was told, but it would take me beyond Christmas and after that who knew what might happen?
I knew what might happen. I might get used to the salary. I might get a nicer place to live. I might get better at mingling with my colleagues. I might even marry one, as long as I could bridge the canteen’s gender divide. Then, in the blink of an eye, I’d be at my retirement do, reading the “Don’t Be A Stranger” card, smiling on the outside but sobbing inside, because I’d gone for the lazy option and lived a life that was all wrong for me.
I thought about it for 15 seconds and said no. To his credit, my father said nothing when I broke the news that I was effectively turning my nose up at the profession he’d dedicated his working life to in favour of a winter on the dole in Galway.
Back home I did what any unemployed, unemployable English graduate would have done: a Teach English as a Foreign Language (Tefl) course. Almost immediately, I got a job in northern Spain and without a word of Spanish, I relocated to a small, polluted mining town in Asturias. The money was awful but the lifestyle was brilliant. Being the only foreigner in the town granted me a certain celebrity status which was enhanced by my new title of “El Professor”.
While there, I applied for a US visa but when my application was accepted I didn’t want to leave my unlikely Spanish idyll. Rather than just turn down the precious green card, I tried to defer it using my acceptance of a post-graduate course as an excuse.
The problem was I had not applied for, or been accepted to, any such course.
The closing date for applications for most courses had passed, but the journalism HDip in UCG was still open. I’d always wanted to be a journalist but the competition for places on the course was fierce, unlike my self-belief. “I’ll never get accepted,” I said to my father. “Just send in the application, you never know,” he insisted. I did, and I got in, and I turned my back on Spain and the US.
But what if I’d said yes to the insurance job, and stayed in that industry? What would I have become? I go looking for the sliding doors in search of answers. I remember the name of just one of my colleagues and a Google search brings up a solitary reference, in the Middle East edition of an insurance magazine.
He’s still with the same company. I phone and am put straight through. I introduce myself like an old friend but he hasn’t a breeze who I am, doesn’t remember that we shared a desk and even walked home to our Ranelagh bedsits together. He still agrees to meet for coffee.
While I hated the claims department he loved it. “You had to be quite structured and organised,” he says. Ah, right, structure and organisation; no wonder I was so useless.
He left that department and went up a floor into underwriting, where he’s stayed. I presumed his life would have panned out completely differently to mine but it’s the similarities, not differences, that are most striking.
He spends his days underwriting, I spend mine over-writing, we bought houses within days of each other and had children within months of each other and we earn much the same too.
His job is less important to him than mine is to me. “There is more to life than work,” he says. “Everyone judges you by who you are and what you do but I know people who are very high up in my organisation and they’re miserable. I think that when you move above a certain level you’ve sold your soul and everything else takes a back seat. This is probably as good as I can get my life and my biggest fear is that I won’t be able to maintain the balance.”
And my biggest fear, now, as it was then, is standing still as life’s unexplored possibilities pass me by.
Maybe I’ve sacrificed the work-life balance that’s so important to my one-time colleague but so be it. I’ll still always be glad I didn’t think too long before rejecting my other life, although I’m still pretty gutted the whole drumming thing didnt work out.
