by Tom Condardo
George Bailey sat slumped over his keyboard, shaking his head in despair. "Who reads this stuff?" he mumbled as he worked on the copy for a client website. "What difference does any of it make? I'll always be just a lowly copywriter. I'd be better off covering high school football for the local paper."
"Of course it makes a difference, George," a voice suddenly called out. "Your clients love what you do. They're generating leads, finding new prospects, and converting sales. The content you provide is a big part of that."
Startled, George turned to see a shadowy figure sitting in the ergonomically designed side chair in the corner of his office.
"Who are you?" he stammered. "How did you get in here?"
"My name is Clarence," the figure answered. "In a former life I was in marketing. I was in charge of working with freelance writers. I'm here to help."
"Help how?" George replied, eyeing him warily. "And it doesn't matter anyway. I should never have started writing business content."
Clarence thought for a moment and then smiled.
"OK George, have it your way."
"You're going to find me another job?" George asked.
"No," Clarence replied. "I'm going to show you what the world would be like if you had never gone into this business."
George dismissed him with a wave of his hand. "You're crazy. Now get out of my office."
He turned back to his computer which suddenly flashed and displayed the spinning beach ball of death.
"What's going on?" George asked, sitting up straight in his chair.
"Oh, nothing," Clarence said with a twinkle in his eye.
George's screen then flashed to his Twitter home page. He noticed the first tweet from Acme Consulting, one of his bigger clients.
"Sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes the bear eats you," it read. Followed by a second tweet which said: "I guess it wasn't meant to be."
"What's that all about?" George wondered aloud.
"Looks like they went out of business," Clarence replied.
"How is that possible?" George asked in disbelief. "They were landing clients left and right. They were looking to add staff to handle the workload."
Well it seems you weren't around to help them with that big content marketing campaign. You never wrote those eBooks and case studies that generated all those leads. They all went to the competition instead."
Facebook then popped up on George's screen. It was Sam Wainright's home page. The top entry read, "Killing it on Candy Crush. Being unemployed has some advantages."
"What???," George exclaimed. "Sam runs a huge manufacturing operation. He's a wealthy businessman. He doesn't have time for playing games online."
"He does now," Clarence answered. "He never read those white papers you wrote on the benefits of using the cloud for IT infrastructure. His costs kept rising and he never could figure out why. He couldn't compete in the global economy and went down the tubes."
"No, no," sobbed George. "Not Sam."
A Kickstarter page appeared on the screen. It was a request for contributions for Ernie the cab driver who was developing a hot new app that automatically scheduled your ride and ordered coffee from Starbucks which was ready for you when you were picked up.
"Ernie launched that app two years ago," George exclaimed. "I wrote a series of blog posts that helped it take off. He's retired and living on an island in the South Pacific."
"Nope," said Clarence. "Never happened. You weren't there to write those blogs. He's still trying to get it off the ground."
George turned and grabbed Clarence by the arms.
"Okay Clarence," George said. "I get it. I get it. Let me go back. I want to go back. I understand now."
Just then George's screen flashed to his email inbox. It was filled with new emails from several customers. The first thanked him for the email campaign he wrote that generated dozens of new leads. Another outlined how much business spiked after they released the new catalogue he wrote. A third told how a client closed a big deal thanks to an eBook he wrote for them. They emails just kept coming.
George turned to show Clarence, but he was all alone.
"Must have been a dream," he said quietly, rubbing his eyes.
He closed his inbox, went into his dropbox folder, and opened the file for the ghost feature article on data analytics he was writing.
"You know this isn't such a bad life after all," he thought as he began to type away. "In fact, it's kind of wonderful."