At the last moment i pulled out from making my local debut before the resident yokels, rednecks, hillbillies, and assorted riff-raff on the week-end. I had relented and agreed to escort Mrs.Wallace to a quiz night at the local hall where many of the locals were apparently keen to glean an insight into the mysterious gowned, slippered, and unemployed stranger that had recently arrived upon the island...i am the only bona fide bludger in the district Mrs.Wallace reliably informs me...

The curiosity would have been piqued by my response to the dreaded 'so what do you do?' from a local woman keen to impart the latest trends in real estate to me. In short, i told her that i have no profession, no ambition, and no desire for exploitation from corporate lickspittles. Yes, she was a real estate agent. After i'd shared some of my thoughts with her on matters economic, i told her my views on land ownership, and to say that she was a little disturbed is something of an understatement. I am bemused at the utter stupidity of the woolly headed narrow minded boring bleating imbeciles that define people by their jobs, assets, residences, investment portfolios, and superannuation funds....

In response to the mortification of Mrs.Wallace by my being spotted in my gown and slippers at an Ungodly hour of the day, i have decided to observe the Sabbath wearing the tried and trusted gown and slippers for the duration of the day...people are the oddest creatures, no? Stricken by fear that they may be looked upon condescendingly if they fail to live up to the perceived expectations decreed by others they recurringly blindly conform without hesitation, and make so many compromises in the process that they lose any faint shadow of self by being like the rest of the tediously boring herd....

Professional? Nothing more than a bullshit word that is a poor excuse for subservience to the state.

- Allan Wallace

A 'Professional' to me, is the kind of person who can only do one thing and has usually only ever done one thing to the exclusion of everything else. If you take these people out of their natural habitat and attempt to enlighten them as to the plethora of fascinating things that exist beyond their modest skill level, they will usually reply: 'Not my field'!
Unfortunately, their 'field' is actually an arid little patch of grass that never drinks from the fountain of eclectic and perverse pleasure that spews forth the homemade lemonade of the tatting amateur.

- Dogbreath

Professional orginally meant being occupied in one of the 'professions' - law, accountancy, and so on.

As the twentieth century rolled on with its ceaseless enlargement of the urban 'middle-classes', in reality substituting a false dignity for an actual salary, the term began to be used to refer to any desk job. It became a badge of entry into the middle-class, albeit without the financial stability that characterised the middle-class of the nineteenth century.

In the end, all kinds of people started to call themselves 'professionals'. Agents, like estate agents, who would never have dared call themselves professional previously, began to adopt the title, seemingly reasoning that since they wore suits that looked a bit like those worn by doctors and lawyers, they must be entitled to the same dignity and respect from those they saw as beneath them in the pecking order.

It's become a pernicious label that's used as a boundary marker in the many-tiered hierarchical games of our modern world. As the great fraud that we are all middle-class has been perpetuated, so people have sought to describe themselves as such, differentiating themselves from the lumpen proletariat by their shiny suits and repmobiles.

In reality, to describe yourself as professional today almost certainly means you aren't a 'professional' in the original sense of the world. As the boundaries of the hierarchical game shift, the true professionals rarely deign to describe themselves as such. New social signifiers have emerged, along the traditional lines of wealth and access to privileged knowledge, so that today it's not enough to have a nice car and take two holidays a year. It's about where you holiday, what you eat, how it's been prepared or grown, the 'authenticity' of your experiences.

Today, those who describe themselves as professional are merely marking themselves as one step removed from the unwashed masses they abhor so much, and the traditional middle-class view them with much the same distaste that the landed aristocracy used to reserve for the nouveau riche.

And so the game rolls endlessly on......

- Snakebrain

Whenever I've been called a professional or have been questioned regarding my professionalism, it has usually involved working for no overtime or the fact that I've questioned authority/the status quo. Generally, those who use the word are posing or being defensive. The real 'Professionals' were Bodie and Doyle: enter scene left, shout, spout something sexist or racist, exit firing guns: a perfect example of 'professionalism'.

- Mr Thursday