If you plan on emailing more than a handful of people and ask for simple information, don’t include your phone number. I’ll tell you of how I learned this: The webpage listing all eligible job coaches is a pile of shit, impossible to search in any other way other than alphabetical, so I spent twenty minutes collecting all the email addresses and an evening setting up a bulk emailer to send the same email to each of the 162 addresses on my list: 1) Have they any experience working with freelance artists, and 2) Do they know the business end of the modern artworld?
To a certain degree, coaching is more about helping you find the answers to your questions and making sure that you ask the right questions, but I’d like to have the help of someone who might know something of the process for applying for grants, where to look for shows, and so on. An ideal would be a cross between a therapist and an agent, but I’ll take what can I find.
I’ve got some seventy replies, many of them using so many exclamation points you wouldn’t believe, and I’ve found a few who don’t seem completely off the mark or insane. Reading the answers, I realise that I ought to have been more specific in my email, explaining a bit more about what I’m doing — In Swedish, “art” can imply both modern art as well as crafts, and is tangental to culture in general, leaving me with a lot of emails about how they “love to knit and be creative, so let’s arrange a meeting, yes?”
Since this coaching business is a buyers market, with many newly started companies vying for government money, I should have known better than to include my phone number with the email. It’s part of my standard signature and I didn’t think anything of it until my phone started ringing early next morning, not letting up until two days later.
As most people know who know me, I’m bad at pickup up the phone. Most often this is because it’s on silent and I’m wearing headphones, but when I suddenly had ten people calling me before lunch I realised what it might be about. So I started screening every call, letting all strange numbers go to voicemail. Some of them sneaky bastards tried calling right back using the *31# prefix — showing up as number unknown on my phone — which I guess should give them a star in the margin for ambition. None of those who called answered yes to my questions, but were quick to point out that coaching isn’t about knowing the market but rather helping you out defining goals and guiding you to the tools necessary to reach them.
Which is all fine and dandy, but given a choice I’d go with someone who might have an inkling of why I’m fucking my grant applications up, and who doesn’t clog my phone up when a simple email with a “no, but x” would suffice. Also, I’m bloody awful over the phone and too weak to say no to persuasive people; Had I not dumped it all to voicemail I would probably be in a group session right now, telling the others what precious flower I am, practising on my networking smile. (Prejudiced? Me?)
I’ve recorded all the messages from my answering machine, but they’re not fun enough to present here and I don’t know what to do with them yet. Suggestion go in the drop box (where I notice there’s a lack of comments regarding hair cut mentioned previously. You need to get with that people, or my hair is gonna get got.)
Also, it would seem that I have a hip bursitis, which sounds sexier than it is. I can walk or stand for about half an hour before the slimebag in my hip gives out and hurts like a sonofabitch. I limp about like Warren Ellis only with much less gravitas. I make faces and scare children, but it hardly cheers me up at all…