Giving up: Michael Kelly gives up income, security, his Blackberry - and commuting - when he leaves his sales job in a software company
It has been a scary couple of weeks. When you've had a salary hitting your bank account on the 25th of each month for 10 years, it's disconcerting to realise that this month there will be none. All manner of things that a person takes for granted, such as health insurance and someone else sorting out their tax affairs, are suddenly their own responsibility. Yesterday I got a message on my new mobile saying "you have no credit" when I tried to make a call. I felt cheap and nasty.
I've had to wean myself off a fairly serious Blackberry addiction. About six months ago I got up one morning at 5.30am to go to a meeting in Cork. Before I had even made myself a cup of tea I was standing in the kitchen responding to an e-mail sent to me the day before. That's when I realised that I was an addict. Could I not have waited a couple of hours? Till maybe 7.30? Handing back my Blackberry was a watershed moment; the moment I stopped being a corporate lackey. Blackberries demanded my attention 24/7, beeping and blinking incessantly. On weekends, because it doubled as my mobile phone, I would find myself jolted back to the world of work by the arrival of an e-mail. I would check it just in case it was a friendly text, and before I knew it, I would be reading a work e-mail.
My new mobile rings a handful of times on a busy day. Some days it doesn't ring at all. I still find myself in Blackberry mode, checking it every five minutes for new messages, but there aren't any.
Jumping off the corporate merry-go-round is the most subversive thing I've ever done. Two years ago, Mrs Kelly and I left the joys of suburban Dublin (ie Gorey) to move to Dunmore East, Co Waterford. Mrs Kelly left her job as an accountant and began training as a primary school teacher, a training she has just completed.
That move felt pretty subversive too. Then, as now, I used to wake at night wondering if the sky would fall in. It didn't, and I hope it won't now.
We joke about being on the breadline and how, if things go pear-shaped, we can always live on free-range omelettes and the contents of our polytunnel. The uncertainty of it all is liberating.
People at work were mostly supportive about the fact that I was jacking in the IT industry. But there was also something else in the air that I couldn't put my finger on. Maybe suspicion. Or sympathy. Or envy. I don't know. Almost everyone I told mentioned some other thing they would like to be doing with their lives but wouldn't chance it because of the financial implications.
Sales is a pressurised job because you are only ever as good as your last sale. So it doesn't really matter if you had a great year last year; how you are doing this year is what counts. There's a constant unpleasant fug in the back of your mind reminding you that you're behind target. That fug has lifted. Freelance writing has its own pressures of course: if you don't write, you don't eat.
There will be less travel, which is a good thing - the roads are a dangerous place to ply a trade these days. I drove about 25,000 miles on my car last year, travelling to customer meetings. This morning I walked about 25 paces from the kitchen to my office.
My biggest bugbear in corporate life was ironing shirts. I calculated once that, based on an average iron time of 10 minutes per shirt and wearing a shirt a day for 40 years, I would spend 73 days of my life ironing. What a phenomenal waste of a precious life. Imagine what you could achieve in 73 days?
I also hate shaving. I shave every second day now (or sometimes I push the boat out and leave it for three days) and who knows, I might even grow a beard. Well, Roy Keane did it when he switched careers.