In 1995, I went on a vacation with my father. I was a junior in college, and took a few days off from class to head to Colorado Springs to visit my grandmother with Dad. It was the beginning of my current career.

I had a paper due the day we returned from Colorado, so I brought my laptop and class notes so that I could work on it while we were there. Sadly, however, I forgot the book that the core of the essay was based on. My father was horrified, and offered to drive me around to local college bookstores to find another copy of the book, which, naturally, I’d barely started reading.

“Fuggit, Dad,” I said. “I’ll just bullshit my way through.”

Now, my father was (and is) well acquainted with my powers of bullshitting. After all, I learned most all of my inimitable skills from him. But he had his doubts. This is to be expected, since he was paying for my college education, and he was about to witness just how little I could get for his money. This was my first three years of college: seeing just how little I could study to maintain a 3.3 GPA. The answer? I could study very, very little and still maintain my grades. This may have been because of how smart I was, but was probably because the UW’s Sociology department didn’t challenge students nearly as much as they should have.

Ever the cocky one, I was sure I could pull it off writing the paper without the book. It was only a six-pager, I had my notes from class, and I knew the general themes of the book. Good enough. My father remained incredulous, but little did he know he was witnessing the future of my career.

Needless to say, I cranked out the paper in a couple days, sans book, and ended up getting a 3.0. Not bad. Not bad at all. My father was, as the US government copywriters would say, “shocked and awed.” What did that 3.0 say about how easy it was to skate through college? What did that 3.0 say about the quality of the education I was receiving? What did that 3.0 say about his frightening ability to teach me how to write effectively about absolutely nothing?

More importantly, what did that 3.0 say about my future career? That’s the real question, and the real answer is this: a lot.

Recently, my friend Echo asked me to help her with a writing project for a website she’s launching. As we talked it over, she mused “How does one write about something that is not their own is beyond me, but I figure you are the expert there.”

“Expert” is overly-generous, but she’s correct in terms of my skill. For those of you who spend your days desperately pondering just what it is that a copywriter does, it can be summed up like this: I get paid to bullshit. Sure: it helps if I have some experience with whatever I’m supposed to write about (say, writing about web hosting when I’ve hosted my own site for several years), but if the sign of a truly good copywriter is one that can hit the keyboard running, having no previous knowledge of what they’re writing about, but still able to make it sound fantastic.

If only my father had known then, in 1995, that he was witnessing the way in which I’d later pay my rent and feed myself, he might have been even more shocked and awed. I know I would have been.