Many, many years ago, I was struggling to earn a little extra cash as a free-lance writer while also struggling to find a full-time job, and not doing very well at either. I belonged to a now defunct organization called Washington Independent Writers, through which I got several miserably paying free-lance jobs. I saw an ad on a bulletin board (this was in the pre-internet days) for a “course” on free-lancing, three hours a week on Saturday for about six weeks. Since it was cheap I decided to take the class.
As it turned out, the class was fun. I liked the instructor, who made being a full-time free-lancer sound plausible (although I had no desire to try to go that route) and the people in the class were fun too. When we met for the last time, the instructor assigned each of us to one of three “support groups”, with the idea that we would continue to meet and reinforce each other. I liked that as well, particularly because the prettiest girl in the class was in my group. She was sweet and wrote funny sketches about a character she called “office girl”, based on her own experiences as a temp.
As I say, forming support groups was a good idea, but it’s not surprising that it didn’t work. Other people generally had more of a life than I did, and giving up three hours each week to get together with people that you didn’t know that well and with whom you didn’t have much in common was almost guaranteed to become too much of a chore. I think by the third meeting it was only me and the “host”, so that was the end of that.
Or so I thought. Three or four months later I was walking into a bakery near my place when I saw the instructor and the “pretty girl” deep in conversation over lunch. I retreated quickly, thinking “so that’s how it works” and feeling that I’d been had. Well, at least someone profited from the class.
