Within a month, Dan had been headhunted by a Hong Kong–based investment bank, and thereafter he played the field, never staying with any company for longer than a year. But he found that, no matter for whom he was working, he loved what he did, and he could never quite believe his good fortune in ending up doing a job that made him money and made him smile. It had always been a bit of a laugh, a game, like playing one schoolboy prank after another.

And then he had been badly caught out. Having decided to switch a substantial amount of his investments over to dot.com technology, he moved to another job that paid so well that the cash-in penalties incurred by the change were going to be written off in a year. But five months later, the dot.com bubble burst. Dan had seen it coming and had tried to offload his shares as fast as he could, but traders by now were wary of his techniques and treated them like leprosy. All he could do thereafter was to watch their value drop day by day. And then he had found the internal e-mail on his computer. At first he thought it a mistake that he had received it, obviously just sent out on blanket coverage. Nevertheless, he had read the e-mail through, two pages of corporate jargon, explaining that the company was being forced to shed jobs due to the collapse of the dot.com market. It wasn’t until he reached the last paragraph that the true meaning of the e-mail hit him.

“This company has always adopted a policy of last-in, first-out, and for this reason, we find ourselves with no alternative other than to terminate your contract of employment.”

There were further remarks and apologies, but Dan hadn’t bothered to read them. He picked up the telephone and immediately called the firm of headhunters that had secured his last position. Over the next hour, he tried time and time again to make contact with someone who could give him advice, but he never managed to get past the sweet-talking receptionist. Eventually, he replaced the receiver, and it slowly began to dawn on him that, for the first time in his working life, he was going to be without financial security and without a job.

At first, he had felt furious with himself for investing so recklessly and bitterly resentful at losing his job, but when, over the next few weeks, he received no offers from the headhunting firms that in the past had been falling over themselves to entice him away from one company to another, those feelings compounded to one of pure terror. At night, sleep deserted him and he would more often than not end up in the kitchen in the early hours of the morning drinking endless cups of tea and trying to blank out his thoughts by watching Open University or second-rate films on the television.