Nine Years of Pain: How I Escaped Banking for Freelancing
This is the story of how I got stuck for nine years in a system that is nearly impossible to escape for a middle-class man with a family.
It starts in Hyderabad in 2010, when sitting idle finally got to my head and I decided I needed to earn. Now, what work does a twelfth-grade pass get? My one skill was that I knew the ABCs of computers — I could solve any problem, hardware to software.
So I started working at a gaming zone. I was obsessed with gaming and obsessed with computers; it looked like the perfect combination. The work was genuinely fun, and the salary was decent for its time. But things didn’t work out with the owner over some disagreements, and after three months I quit. 2011 had begun. The earning itch, however, refused to go away. Around then I visited my village, and in conversation with my brothers, the idea of a TV cable business came up.
Seizing the moment, I volunteered to run the whole thing: “You just start it, I’ll do the work.” Both brothers were busy with their shops, and they figured — good, our own guy gets a job and we get a business started.
It took six months to get off the ground. I told my parents I was moving to the village to work with my brothers. Now, my parents had shifted to Hyderabad precisely for my education and my father’s work, and they had no plans of moving back. My mother (may Allah grant her Jannah) was deeply worried about me going far away. And then the cable work began: circling people’s houses all day in the heat — punishing physical work, for a guy whose natural habitat was a computer in the shade.
It took exactly one week to find that out. Still, I didn’t give up. Then my exams came around and I returned to Hyderabad. During the exams I fell ill and the whole plan of going back fell apart. My brothers were properly annoyed — but the obsession with working was still on my head, and by now my parents could see it too.
A friend of my father’s was an area manager at Bank Al Habib. My father asked him to look into a job for his son. I hadn’t completed my graduation (that’s another story 😁), so he said: if he can handle a cashier’s job, send him in for an interview.
My father asked if I was up for it. I said, just tell me when. It was a Friday; at 11 a.m. he said they’re calling you now, before the 12 o’clock prayer break. “Wear a tie” — which I didn’t know how to knot. So there I was in 2011, learning to tie a tie from YouTube, feeling very clever about it.
I cleared all the interviews, and on the 27th of Ramadan I had my first day as a cashier at Bank Al Habib, Qasimabad branch. I was overjoyed to have the job.
Within one month, I knew two things: I couldn’t do this job, and I shouldn’t. (To all my friends working in banks and other corporate institutions — my apologies; this is purely my own opinion and experience.) I wanted new technology and computers in my life, and a cashier’s counter had no room for either. At a bank, only your arrival time is fixed; to go home you must finish a list of tasks without which leaving is simply not possible. I saw days that ended at 3 a.m., Sundays at the bank, showing up on all three days of Eid. And a cashier has his own special problems on top — like the two counterfeit 25,000-rupee prize bonds that landed on me, incidents I can never forget. There’s plenty more, but some things are better left veiled.
Once you have a job, the next item on the list is marriage. Within a year of getting the job, I was married. Responsibility grew, and the bank job rolled on. I’ve already described the hours — what else can a person do around them? I wasn’t a good banker. I took far too many leaves. I started falling sick. The one thing I’m certain of: whenever I was at my post, I gave 100 percent.
My banking career began in August 2011 and ended in December 2020 — more than nine years — and through all nine I kept searching for a way out of the system. During COVID, while the world suffered real hardship, one side effect was shorter banking hours, which let me give proper time to freelancing. The attempt had been running continuously through all those years.
It took nine years to earn my first dollar from freelancing. And with that, I was free of the corporate sector’s pain. To this day my goal is the same: don’t be an employee — work as a partner.
But I’m also certain of this: whatever I am today, I am because of those experiences. So do spend at least some period of your life in a job — especially at a corporate institution. The lessons are worth it.