Chapter 5

If it hadn’t been for the worms it is highly likely I would be writing this story from my palatial office in a major hospital or as part of a large City law firm.

If it were not for worms, it is highly likely that I my standard work uniform would not be a (Size 16) grey pant suit with bright coloured sandals, matching earrings and chunky necklace, with a name tag boldly displayed on my ample bosom saying: “Shivanthi S. Principal”.

If not for worms, I would be dressed in a gown of some sort on my usual days at work – a surgical gown or a black dress with a silly wig.

I am no doctor or lawyer by profession, but the next best thing if you ask me. I am a real estate agent by profession, a fact that had many of my parent’s friends and associates raising their collective eyebrows. It was what you could call something ‘left field’, the curve ball that many of those of my ethnicity could not clearly compute.

For you see, real estate agentry to a bright Sri Lankan female is a little like pole dancing to Margaret Thatcher: simply incomprehensible.

Indeed over the years, when people had asked my parents what their eldest (still unmarried!) daughter did for a living, you would find Mum or Dad feigning a coughing fit or a seizure as they attempted to mention the unmentionable.

“But I AM a professional, Mum,” I’d hiss. “Why are you so embarrassed.”

It was no good. In my parents’ world, to be a real estate agent was about as much of a “profession” as being a ditch digger.

Anyone with half a brain of Sri Lankan ancestry is considered to be destined for the professions – the real ones. That’s the ‘done thing’, ‘the given’. It didn’t help that I had been “a brilliant student” in my high school years, according to reports by several of my teachers. Their gushing reports of my exceptional results had resulted in dangerously high expectations.

When I was a young teenager, my mother always boasted to anyone who would listen, that her daughter would one day be a surgeon.

It was a futile exercise in a self-fulfilling prophesy for her ambitions were clearly doomed from the start.

Which is how the worms come into it.

I sucked at the sciences, the prerequisites for a career in medicine. And then, there was the ill-fated experiment in biology requiring the dissection of an earth worm.

I couldn’t get it right, slaughtering more than my fair share of the unfortunate annelids in my Year 8 Biology class, and proving a woeful lack of hand-eye co-ordination that could not bode well for an ambition in surgery.

I just couldn’t cut straight, my hands shaking as if I had the palsy so badly that instead of neatly bisecting the creatures I cut most in half . It was like the Texas Earthworm Massacre, my lab table a mass of worm halves by the end of the lesson and the rest of the class shaking their heads in disbelief.

My complete ineptitude at Home Economics was a further ill augury.

I recall one of my earliest ‘sewing’ assignments in Year 10, when I produced the hideous piece of clothing you could imagine. So poor was my stitching that one arm went blue when slipped through the sleeve; the hem was finished at a dubious angle; and the collar I sewed of such poor proportions that, when finished, my head appeared to be balanced on a rather large dinner plate.

I was a poor seamstress and so I could not stitch. I had a gammy hand and so I could not dissect (damn worms!).

Surgery was certainly never to be my forte.

There was the law, of course, but my parents simply could not countenance that. I have no idea why at the time. It would be only years later that I would associate their feelings with an unpalatable story involving a rather well-known Sri Lankan legal figure and what were most likely some unsavoury advances to my mother.

““I can’t believe he put his hand on my backside,” my mother would exclaim, decades later. “Chi! As if I would look twice at him, ugly fellow.”

In my final year of high school, I was called upon to make one of the most important decisions of my life. What I would do with my education. I had duxed every one of my humanities subjects. I was average at best at mathematics.

My parents’ dreams of producing a doctor were clearly misguided. What was left to me?

I could tell you that I pondered deep, long and hard on the career path I would choose. But I would be lying.

The truth is, I chose my career in the least scientific way possible. When selecting my university course, I simply opted to do what my best friend at the time, Louise was doing. Much more organised and career focussed that I was, Louise had done all the research and proved to be a well-informed career guidance source. She gave me a compelling synopsis of her course of first-choice comprising one sentence.

“Err, it’s called, um, a Bachelor of Business Communication and you can do like, Advertising, Journalism and Public Relations,” she explained.

“Sounds alright to me!” With barely a blink of an eye, I decided this was the course for me.

And so it was that I took the first steps to what would eventually become An Unsuitable Career.

But what I didn’t realise at the time was that choosing a career in fact should involve a great deal more thought and rumination.

I had probably spent more time choosing a filling for my lunch time routine of sandwiches.

There are many practical considerations when choosing a career such as:

1. Does your family background make you suitable for your career of choice? For example, if your Uncle Dan is a convicted paedophile, it’s probably wise to avoid a career involving children for the sake of possibly unpleasant associations down the track. If your mother is the town whore, then it’s probably unwise to consider a political career although, come to think of it, this may be a very good match when you think about the number of people you have to screw to make it to the top job.

2. Do you have the kind of personal qualities that suit your chosen career. For example, those who are prone to seedy qualities – lying, stealing and the like – are wise to avoid leanings toward careers in crime prevention. Blind people make lousy lighthouse keepers. School bullies should avoid social work. Those who can’t keep secrets should forego careers in the secret service. I’m sure you get my drift.

3. Does your chosen career enable you to do the things you want to do in life? Want to meet a millionaire, marry him and never have to work again? Perhaps avoid jobs in the prison system. Want to travel to exotic places? Then the public service is an unlikely choice unless you consider a visit to a cubicle on another floor to constitute an exciting travel experience. Want to become rich and famous? Then a career in quantity surveying is not for you as this is not a profession that is always a stepping stone into celebrity magazines.

At 17 though, who thinks about these things? At 17, you are full of possibilities and the idea of practicalities is clearly stifling and is to be ignored.

I didn’t know it then but that star my Mum was wishing on for my brilliant career was infact her dream, combusting, exploding and being sucked into a black hole.

Practical Consideration #1

Unless you’re planning to be a movie star, it’s likely that your name is the last thing you’d consider when choosing a career.

It’s certainly not something I considered.

I’ve checked my white pages and I can confirm that there are some unfortunate surnames.

If your surname is ‘Bitch’ or ‘Harsh’ do you really want a career as a preschool teacher or a marriage counsellor? If your surname is ‘Reckless’ you’re probably not suited to be a driving instructor or an inspector of quality standards in a condom factory. ‘Corpse’, ‘Coffin’ and ‘Death’? Nursing, medicine, and anything to do with keeping people alive and well are, adviseably, out.

Where my name was concerned, I was doomed to stand out like testicles on a naked nun.

Shivanthi Sattambirilage-Koorkoolasuriya Nanayam Pieris. You try introducing yourself like that on a public phone? Before you can gasp for breath, you have to insert another coin.

At 21-syllables, it’s a name that’s unlikely to be used as a pseudonym or anyone wishing to work undercover.

It’s a name that is unlikely to be used by a supermodel or a rock star. Or come to think of it, a newsreader.

It’s a name that gets you into trouble at American airports.

It’s a name that’s difficult to pronounce under the influence of alcohol.

It’s an unsexy name and it’s my ‘baggage’. Because my name means I cannot be separated from my ethnicity.

My name screams FOREIGNER in any country other than Sri Lanka and especially in my adopted country.

The two together – my Sri Lankanness and the world that was Australia – meant my name was one of the practicalities I should have considered in making my career choice.

But I didn’t.


Practical Consideration #2

Believe or not, how you speak and sound can make a huge difference in your career of choice, as I was to (belatedly) discover.

We all know that people with beautiful rounded accents and deep voices are born for roles in radio. We know that people who can speak quickly are great as race callers or auctioneers. And those with husky, sensual voices will do well in just about any career with possibly the exception of bull-wrestling or anything else where large amounts of testosterone are a requirement.

But what about people with voices like mine? Accented with spices, loud and not always comprehensible?

What about people who speak too quickly? Who can’t pronounce their “R”s or “Ws” or have lisps?

These are not voices usually heard on the recorded voices in elevators. ‘The Thseventh floor, pleaths mind your tstep” – I don’t think so.

They aren’t the voices reading out the weather. “In Bwisbane today we can expect wainy conditions with fine conditions for the west of Austwalia”.

Speech pathology is out for those with voice impediments, or anything where you may have to talk to people and/or be taken seriously, it seems.

In my case, being of Sri Lankan origin has meant that I have been cursed with an accent that automatically mean people look for my mop, bucket and broom. Mine is the accent of the hired help.

I should have taken this into consideration.

But I didn’t.

Subsequently, when at the age of 20, I found my self released from the steady environment of education into the ‘real world’, I was confronted by a range of challenges that pushed me further and further away from what I had imagined would be my (poorly) chosen field of endeavour.

Firstly, thanks to my name and accent, I found that while my wonderful letter writing skills secured me the interview, one look at my brown (and unpleasantly freckled) face meant that I didn’t even get to square one.

I wrote 180 letters, received five job interviews, and exactly ‘zero’ job offers.

I doggedly pursued my ambitions to be fully employed.

I applied for the Public Service and was told I was “too motivated” to journalism.

I applied for a clerical position at the Brisbane City Council and had to perform an IQ test. I was told I was “unlike any other applicant” they had ever had and additionally, not stupid enough to be primed for the tedious career of a bureaucrat.

What to do? Mummy encouraged me to do another degree – as an Executive Secretary – so I could be a Hansard reporter.

How low I had sunk – from possible brain surgeon to secretary. The world was proving to be a cruel place.

Had it not been for my Dad and his fixation with the technical education system, it is likely that that is where I would have ended up – as that embalmed and featureless fixture in the corner of a court house or the House of Representatives, trying to contain my expressions of contempt or disbelief as my fingers sped over a keyboard, resigned to letting my brain shrink by nanometres as my working day stretched to a working eternity.

Instead, my Dad chanced upon the Certificate in Real Estate offered by the Coorparoo TAFE – and so my career began. No, it was not a brilliant one, but it meant I would have an income and that was now, apparently enough.

You see, for all my parents’ Sri Lankan desires for producing a family of barristers and brain surgeons, my Mother especially was nothing if not practical.

It has been one of her strengths that, like the subject of a Kenny Rogers song, she’s been canny enough to know when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em.

And so, she folded up her aspirations that I could possibly be the next Queen of England and accepted that I was to be a scullery maid.

But that was not my fate, as we would eventually discover. Because I had a special talent that was far more valuable than my high IQ, my typing speed or the fact that I can lick the tip of my (long, pointed) nose with my tongue. My special talent was that I was a liar. Not just any liar. A great one.

Fate it seemed had delivered me to the most suitable of those unsuitable careers: the year I turned 22, I joined the not-at-all-ironically-named firm of ‘Robb & Hammer’ and began my journey to become one of Brisbane’s leading – and only female - real estate entrepreneurs.