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I'm proud to say that I wasn't one of those consultants or contractors. Mainly because there's only so much boredom you can tolerate before you want to chuck the whole thing in disgust, regardless of the ridiculously inflated hourly rate. There isn't much to be said for doing work that you don't really want and don't believe should be done in the first place, just because the money's good. Even the much maligned common prostitute has higher professional ethics than that. I made it clear to the agencies I worked through that I wasn't interested in it and most never bothered to ring me about it after being told the first time.

There was one exception: an agent who told me that the job on offer definitely was not Y2K work after I'd given him the usual spiel. The interview didn't last long. After the employer described the work: running a test program that identified potential Y2K compliance problems in other programs, fixing them, testing again and so on, until the program came up clean. I told him that the agency had wasted both his time and mine by sending me over, then went back to the agency for some forthright post-interview feedback. I never heard from them again.

It's difficult not to miss the days when I was a sought after professional with a considerable degree of cachet but most importantly, in the modern Australian labour market, raw market power. The main differences between working on the factory floor or building site and working up in the office, is that in the office the money's better, you start and finish later in the day and you don't get dirt under your fingernails. Everything else is snobbery.

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