So what do you do for a living?

I've come to loath the question. At parties or in the pub it heralds the start of a 30-minute conversation with friends of friends as they latch onto this interesting nugget, this cruton in the otherwise bland conversational soup. For them this is a welcome change from the interminable "oh yaw, I work in AYE-TEE".  Unfortunately its a conversation I've had a hundred times before. I know exactly how it will go and exactly the bon-mots I will use to deconstruct their prejudices, the misconceptions they will have and the sorts of things they will want to hear about as they avoid talking to the advertising executive to their left.
Sometimes I tell them I'm a dentist just to not have to go through it all one more time.

But other times I don't, othertimes their demeanour tells me that they will be appalled at the idea of doing what I do for a living. The reality is that I organise, play, referee, promote, consult, write about, eat, sleep and drink poker. Most people just want to hear about the play aspect and some are astonished and horrified in equal part. Sometimes, with those people, I avoid the topic. Other times, particularly with people I care little about I tell them the truth. I like to get right in their small conservative faces about it.

I sat with my bank manager and his boss recently. I was in to talk to them about my bank loan from when I was in business. As far as they know I'm a website entrepreneur. I got the usual bollocking for missed payments etc and then a vague threat about the Irish Credit Bureau.

Well I don't react too well to threats. I'd just recovered from a broken leg and having my company go spang. And I was trying hard to make ends meet to even pay them anything back at all, let alone missing a single payment! So I told them what I really did for a living. I told them that most weeks I staked a sizeable chunk of the loan amount I owed them through the night in quasi-legal poker games in those "clubs" they had heard of. That I hadn't seen AM for quite some time. That I have no car, no house, no wife and precious little keeping me in this country. That I travelled the world to attend the biggest games I could find (technically true, I didn't mention that I reported on them rather then played in them!) and that there was precious little they could take from me that I hadn't already sold for a buy-in (technically not true, I've never really owned anything of value in the first place!)

In the most wonderful Fight Club moment, and with my bank manager increasingly looking like he had invited a recently released paedo to be Bobo the Clown at his kid's birthday party, I explained that my office job and I had parted company on the grounds that it had become a case of it or poker, that since there was very little keeping me in the country I might soon relocate to somewhere else.... somewhere unspecific. I couldn't really make up my mind about my future and but that was ok since frankly I was living from day to day anyway.

Tyler's words coming out of my mouth.

I have never been a strong reader of people but it wasnt hard to read their appalled vista's. The horrified, open mouth of my bank manager said "oh my god... *this* is who we lent our money to!". His boss, who hadnt said a word to this point, stepped in and the entire tone of the conversation changed. Banks are funny like that, they make it YOUR problem that you owe them money. If you think about it clearly enough, its really THEIR problem! I left 5 minutes later with a repayment scheme that basically read "what I can, when I feel like it". Sometimes, just sometimes, prejudices are fun to screw with....