Also, a dumb theory of lying in PR
I stumbled into a PR career ass-backward. I say this with love and respect for those of you who dreamed of a PR career, went to PR school and diligently worked your way up. But that’s not how it happened for me.
It was late 2001 and startup number two in Singapore had imploded following the collapse of the dot-com bubble and some poor management choices. Italian furniture isn’t cheap. Six years and two dead startups into my Singapore journey, it seemed like time for a change of vocation. Also, no one was hiring “Internet” people in 2001. Sitting in the oily puddle at the the bottom of the trough of disillusionment, we were best not touched with bare hands, like medical waste.
Some of my beach football friends worked for the Singapore office of a small New Zealand-based PR firm. They had a problem in the form of Microsoft Singapore, one of their clients. Nobody at the agency knew much about technology, and the notoriously demanding Microsoft team was losing patience.
On the beach, a ropey and affable New Zealander, who was amazingly fit and fast at the inconceivably geriatric age of 45, made the pitch. I had worked in radio and television in San Francisco and co-written two books about computer games, and I had just done several years of technology project management and had a good grasp of Microsoft’s products. Had I ever considered working in public relations?
I had not. Not only that, but at startup number two I’d held our PR woman in cold contempt. I didn’t understand her job. Her requests seemed burdensome and trivial. I had important things to do!
Karma is, as they say, a bitch. I owe her the hugest apology.
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I met the agency’s Singapore office leader, Kylie, a radiantly charismatic Australian woman who was the team rainmaker. “Ehhh,” she drawled when I pointed out that I had zero PR experience. “You can write and you understand tech. We can teach you the PR bit.” Also, she offered double what anyone would pay me to do Internet related work.
I negotiated the final details of the job a week or two later, while in Laos with my father, standing ankle-deep in the Mekong in Vientiane so I could catch a Thai cell signal from across the river. And that is how, at the age of 34, I made a mid-career switch into comms. And probably also got some kind of hideous river-borne blood parasite.
Imagethief 