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The Shadow Scholar

Page 16

by Dave Tomar


  It was September 2004, and I had my very own classifieds.

  Good thing, really, since I was applying for two. I could work for no company that would not also have Ethan as its employee. I owed him that at the very least. At the very least.

  I received ten responses, and after reading my sample work and Ethan’s sample work, the most promising of the companies agreed to hire us both.

  And we were off and writing once again.

  Ultimately, we took the bulk of our work from the one company that paid best. This company’s model was different from that employed by my old company. The new company brought in almost as much work, but its system was slightly less automated. Every minute of every day, my in-box would flood with e-mails detailing available assignments: for example, “plant species of the Paleolithic era: 10 pages, Due 2/14, 6 sources, APA format, College (4th year).”

  I would respond with a quote: “I can write this for $130.”

  I would receive a “Go Ahead” e-mail from the company anytime one of my bids was accepted. Then the paper was my responsibility. Once it was completed, I would forward it to the customer using an e-mail service provided by the company. At the end of each week, I would calculate my total earnings and invoice the company using PayPal. This company didn’t have the handy calendar system maintained by my previous employer. I had to keep track of my own finances, so I created an assignment book. The assignment book became a constant companion, a predictor of fortunes and miseries ahead.

  Ethan and I were taking some regular work from a hodgepodge of paper-writing websites. None were quite as prolific or profitable as our primary employer, and some were downright shady Eastern European websites without phone numbers or direct e-mail addresses. But I was taking work anywhere I could get it. Unless otherwise noted, my assignments were almost always due by eleven fifty-nine p.m. eastern standard time.

  At the main company I worked for, we submitted assignments and e-mailed customers through a company-assigned e-mail box, but the bulk of the correspondence was mediated by Melissa, the customer service representative.

  These were the years when I really sharpened my tools. Because the company’s system was not as automated, and because I developed a reputation with my employer for efficiency and a willingness to take on unpleasant assignments, I would receive daily e-mails from Melissa. The details of a particular assignment would be forwarded to me with an inquiry such as “this one?,” “can you complete something like this?,” or “pretty please?”

  It was the beginning of a whole new training regimen. If I’d been a fastball pitcher who occasionally used a changeup to throw off the batter, I was now being asked to develop a curveball, a slider, and a knuckleball while spending considerable time working at the batting cages, too. I was becoming a multidimensional player. I said I would write anything, and they held me to it. Even if I preferred the rhetorical fluffiness of history and sociology, I was being asked to report on tax law, to explore the epidemiology of kidney failure, to dissect competing economic theories, to explain American monetary policy, to outline the changes in data management trends. In short, I was being asked to write things that nobody would ever volunteer for. And I never said no.

  At a certain point, with business cranking, Ethan and I even created our very own paper-writing company and website with the intention of cutting out the middleman. Almost universally, wherever I have worked, you collect half the money and the company collects the other half. We figured we could charge a little less overall and still make more. We enlisted Donovan Root and Bobby, another of our computer-prodigy friends, and we collectively designed a fully functional e-commerce website.

  We called it Paper911. It was a flop.

  We got a couple of regular clients. One guy from Saudi Arabia ordered three papers a week from us for a year. But ultimately, it was tough to compete with the type of work we were getting from the other companies combined. There was also a growing sense for both Ethan and I, as the intensity of this way of making a living became ever more apparent, that one could not realistically attach oneself to this kind of profession and hope to ever be a normally functioning human being. The body simply wouldn’t stand for it, to say nothing of the psyche. Paper911 folded from disinterest as the workload from the other companies increased.

  Then, in 2005, Ethan bailed. He was burned out and tired of working his ass off for pennies. I couldn’t say I blamed him. He got a job at a big-time Fortune 500 company writing project proposals. He told them exactly what he’d been doing for a living all these years, and they found the experience fascinating. I was most officially on my own now. Just me and the assignment book.

  My constant bedside partner was the sleepless night. Greeting me in the morning was the cycloptic stare of my computer. And my assignments were getting bigger, too.

  I wrote an eighty-page paper on kava, which is a mildly hallucinogenic substance ingested ceremonially by the tribal people of Fiji. I loved that paper. Did you know that at low tide you can literally wade from one Fijian island to the next?

  I also wrote fifty pages on the plays of Tennessee Williams in two parts. A little melodramatic at times but compelling nonetheless. Dude choked to death on the cap from his over-the-counter eyedrops. The longest papers weren’t always the worst ones.

  It was usually the customer who made it terrible.

  The following exchange concerns the completion of several admissions essays for a student with big dreams.

  The standard prospective-assignment e-mail contains the following prompt to the customer, along with additional disclaimers:

  To ensure that your writer completes this paper to your satisfaction, we encourage you to send the name and level of your class as well as any other information you feel is important—including any faxed materials—as soon as possible.

  If you do not inform the writer ahead of time concerning any special requirements, we cannot be responsible if we do not follow them!

  I received an e-mail from Melissa.

  Interested in this one? Due in five days… If so, bid?

  http://www.psu.edu/ admissions/ intlapply/ pdf/ IntlSupplement.pdf

  How much would it cost me to get those essay questions answered?

  I responded.

  I can write this for $25. I can answer each of these two questions in the space of a page, using information provided by the client to highlight academic achievements and other personal accomplishments entitling admission to Penn State.

  Melissa gave me the go-ahead with the following instructions:

  Please do these, and thanks! And please do the OPPOSITE of the bilingual dictionary assignment with him—he was VERY CLEAR that he wants an “ivy league” writer (his words)… Thanks!

  Very shortly thereafter, she sent me the following request:

  These would be for the same client as the PSU ones (which I am about to assign to you)…

  Can you do as well? If so, bid? (total 2600 words)

  I need my Brown essays: italics are my comments

  Question #1:

  Tell us about the academic areas which interest you most and your reasons for applying to Brown.

  I want this to be about 750 words. What interested me most was Brown’s location and it’s student body. I need the writer to elaborate and find other things about brown that make it interesting

  Question #2:

  Who interested you in Brown (e.g., college counselor, Brown alumnus/a, admission officer, undergraduate, relative)?

  No one interested me in Brown. I have searched through many Ivy League schools and I foun that brown is

  The top choice for me due to it’s great collegiate sports for entertainment, and it’s great professors. About 350 words would do it.

  Question #3:

  In reading your application, we want to get to know you as well as we can. We ask that you use this opportunity to tell us something more about yourself that would help us toward a sense of who you are, how you think, and what issues and
ideas interest you most.

  This is where I need the writer to throw some sort of hook that will make them really look at me. I need about 1500 words that will really blow the wall open with explosiveness.

  As you will have noticed above, the customer did not provide me with any information regarding his chosen area of study, his academic strengths, or his professional aspirations. So I simply did my best to blow the wall open with explosiveness.

  And I can do this because I’ve written a lot of admissions essays. According to a U.S. Census Bureau report, in 2009 there were more than nineteen million students enrolled in two-year colleges, four-year colleges, and graduate schools. And of course, most of them probably applied to multiple schools. And that was just the people who got in. So if my calculations are correct, that amounts to a metric fuckload of admissions essays.

  God help the poor souls who have been charged with the responsibility of reading them, of wading through claims of personal excellence, of challenges met and bested, of spin-doctored triumph, of tragedy terrible enough to distinguish the individual as having depth and experience, all to find that perfectly singular little snow-flake in a blizzard of poorly obscured mediocrity.

  I wonder how frequently this is actually a rewarding job. How often can millions of people asking for the same exact thing every single year find a unique way to ask for it? So I do my best to make the admissions-essay readers’ job a little more interesting. I indulge in the generic and craft sentences that seem to view their own content as remarkable in spite of its mundane obviousness.

  The student wants you to know that he has overcome a great deal of personal anguish brought on by the death of his great-grandparent, and that watching a man die in his late nineties really makes you think.

  So I say, “I have stared unblinking into the eyes of the grim specter of death. Perhaps more than most students, I have come face-to-face with the fragility of human life. That a man could be snuffed out so easily and senselessly would fill me, though, not with a sense of dread but instead with a sense of determination. Life is short and precious. I am determined to make every second count, beginning with my selection of a university such as yours. No doubt, my time on earth will have been well spent should the next four years of it be in the company of your brilliant professors, your diverse student body, and your state-of-the-art facilities.”

  Or the student says that he wants his hoped-for university to know that he learned a sense of personal responsibility in high school during his fifteen hours a week stocking shelves at the Safeway for minimum wage.

  So I say, “As a young man, I had a distinctly tragic upbringing. I toiled in a Dickensian sweatshop without proper fire safety regulations. I learned in my early teens that survival is largely a consequence of determination, willpower, and optimism. Every time I tasted the lash of my supervisor’s whip, I closed my eyes and dreamed of a brighter day when I might sit beside my peers at a university and learn how to make a better life for myself, and in turn, for the world.”

  Or the student wants me to make some explanation for why his performance in high school was relatively subpar and why his college performance will be considerably better.

  So I say that “I boldly faced the challenge of balancing my studies with a full extracurricular schedule. In addition to my participation in after-school sports and my active role in student government, I spent the better part of my time outside of the classroom battling the unending scourge that is the walking undead. In my junior year, I succeeded in fighting off a zombie apocalypse while maintaining a 2.8 GPA. While my dedication to my studies may not be reflected in my class rank, the fact that the world has not yet been overrun with pus-spitting, brain-eating corpses is a testament to the work ethic that I will bring to your campus if granted admission.”

  Well, anyway, this was my general take on how best to approach my Penn State and Brown essays. This guy seemed like a sport. And he seemed like a business major. And since he didn’t give me any information at all on the Penn State essay, not even so much as the suggestion that I blow the wall open with explosiveness, I used what I could glean from the Brown notes. And I wrote an explosive, wall-blowing-open essay for Penn State about my business acumen and ambitions.

  I guess I had misjudged him.

  A day after completion, Melissa forwarded the following e-mail, straight from the customer:

  See, He didn’t ask me.

  I wanted to go into the Premedicine/Medical 6 year program.

  This needs to be done, and quick.

  Melissa followed this up with her own message.

  Hey Dave,

  Can you please either revise, or explain to him why what you

  did will work?

  I also told him that it was HIS responsibility to send you information, not yours to ask…

  Thanks,

  Melissa.

  Now the timing was pretty bad. I was on a train heading up to New York with Harmon. Harmon and I have been friends our whole lives, going back to diapers, nursery school, and row homes in Northeast Philly. We were on our way to see Tom W. play a show in the city.

  We had also grown up with Tom W., a rock singer now verging on mainstream recognition. At the time of the show, he was an unknown singer-songwriter zigzagging desperately across North America and Europe for gigs while living in Queens.

  He was doing a homecoming show after his most recent road wars. So I got this bitchy little customer e-mail while I was trying to enjoy the uniquely scorched and devastated stretch of the Northeast Corridor from New Jersey’s Metropark onward.

  I pried my eyes away from the view and an unconscious fantasy about survival in the Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome world streaking by us.

  I opened my laptop and composed the following message:

  Naturally, having never received any details from the customer on personal preference, aside from the italicized information accompanying the Brown essay request, I made some assumptions. I don’t mind fixing the essay up, but it’s up to the customer to provide me with any information he’d like to highlight. Otherwise, I’m left to my own resources and I tend to be creative. I can fix this by tomorrow morning but I would advise the customer to provide me with as much detail as he’d like. Likewise for the Brown essays, which I will confirm as well, the more detail, the better.

  Dave,

  I hear you, completely, and I told him this. Between you and me, he can be really obnoxious. Anyway—like I said, I did tell him this, but for the Brown essays, can you please also tell him this, and BCC me? That way, there will be no misunderstandings, and there will be a record that you told him to send whatever he wanted you to know…

  Thanks, and I appreciate this, Melissa

  Melissa,

  I could theoretically have the PSU revision completed to night if the customer were to forward some basic details. For some strange reason, though, he has not sent any such information. Also, regarding the Brown material, if he should confirm these essays, I would need additional information.

  Let me know if you hear from him. Thanks.

  Dave

  Dave,

  I have told him now twice that he needs to send you more information. So, since he has been well-informed, all you can do is your best, and if he’s still not happy, he will have to live with that. :-)

  Thanks!

  Melissa

  Ok. That sounds fine by me. Let me know if you hear from him.

  Thank you, I will!

  I closed my laptop as we pulled into Penn Station. We had to grab a taxi and get to the venue. We got to a mildewy dive on Avenue B at eight, and Tom W. wouldn’t go on until eleven. Plenty of time to get started on my Brown essays with a new focus on my premed studies. If I could knock those out now, I could hope to get enough information from the student to complete the PSU revisions before morning.

  Harmon and I walked outside and smoked a joint in an empty basketball court. I humped a computer pack on my back like the dork in my army platoon. Then
we returned to the bar, jammed a bunch of dollars into the jukebox, and ordered dinner, which was a Guinness and a shot of tequila. As I wrote, we repeated this order every thirty minutes until Tom W. went on. I finished up my Brown essays and sent them to the customer.

  By the time Tom W. got up there, his solo performance looked like a power trio to me. My vision was sliding in and out of focus like a windshield with slow-moving wipers.

  It was around midnight, right in the middle of Tom’s set, when I got yet another e-mail.

  Dave,

  Here is the latest correction from [the customer] re: Brown revisions… I’ve been assuming 4 characters per word…Thanks, and please let me know when you can do them and if you need more money… Thanks! :-)

  Melissa

  Melissa,

  I have no idea what this guy is asking for. When I mentioned to him that I would revise the PSU paper, he failed to provide me with additional information in the due time so I assumed he didn’t need the edit. For $15, I can go through it and suit it to a premed. course of study. As for the Brown essay, I have no idea what he’s talking about. I’m not sure how to help him.

  Dave,

  That’s OK.

  I think he didn’t realize you needed more information for the PSU paper. Can you please ask him for more, and explain to him what you told me?

  Also, what he wants, basically, is for you to edit the Brown essays down from whatever the word counts are now to 1500 characters (or, probably about 500 words) for the first essay, 500 characters (or probably about 100 words) for the second essay, and 3500 characters (or about 700 words) for the third one… Melissa

 

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