Work-related bitching

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a writer. I do a lot of my work through online freelance web sites. That means that I am constantly looking for new work -- it’s the downside to being a freelancer. You control the work you take, which people you will work for, and you control your time but you are always looking for new jobs. Personally, I love the variety of being a freelancer. I work on jobs for a few days or a few weeks and then I have a great sense of completion. I get paid. And I can move on to something else. It’s great.

I also love the fact that I can work at home. I always hated working in an office. I used to get up every morning, do my hair and make-up, dress up, put on heels, drive to work and mostly be miserable all day. I would get panic attacks when the phone on my desk rang -- and it seemed to ring all the time. I had bosses who seemed to time the minutes an employ left their desk for a break. I did it for years, until I couldn’t take it any more.

The thing is, I did basically the same kind of work then that I do now. I was a writer. I got paid more. I had great benefits. But I was deeply unhappy. Now I make less money and I have to take care of my own benefits, but I am very happy with my working conditions.

The only times I get a little concerned are when the work temporarily dries up for a while, and that does happen. I haven’t noticed much effect from the bad economy yet, but my bids for jobs are turned down sometimes, or there is a long lag time between when someone advertises for a job and when they award it. At other times I may have 2-3 jobs going at once. So, you have to learn to ration out your money.

The other thing that gets me worked up sometimes are people’s expectations when they put a job online. Some of them make me laugh. They want writers to work for nothing. They all promise long-term relationships and expect writers to work for almost pennies per article. One buyer recently posted a job wanting 100 articles per day (500 words each) and would pay $1 per article that he selected. He would only pay for the articles that he chose. You would simply be out of luck on the others. That was outrageous. I don’t even think it’s humanly possible to write that many articles in a day. Amazingly he did receive a couple of job bids over the course of 2-3 weeks, though I don’t know if they accepted his terms. They would be crazy if they did. That’s far below the average rate of pay.

I look at a lot of possible jobs everyday and one of the things I see that always makes me roll my eyes is when a buyer writes that they are looking for a professional and that the work must be grammatically correct with no spelling errors. Hello! We’re all professionals here. Just because you can’t write or spell doesn’t mean that we can’t. Quit wasting our time and tell us what you need. And don’t just say that you are looking for an article writer. We know that. Tell us the subject. If you need 20 articles on the banking industry I won’t waste my time bidding. It would take me hours to research that subject. On the other hand, if you need 20 articles on dogs or travel or something else I know about, then I may bid. The subject can make all the difference.

I do love freelancing. I like to be able to pick and choose who I will work for. If I read a description for a job and the buyer sounds like an ass I have the luxury of just moving along. I can skip it and find something I like better. I find that it eliminates a lot of stress in life to avoid asses. I tend to avoid buyers who use words like “demand” and “insist” or phrases like “won’t tolerate” in their ads. The way I look at it, they’re paying me xx amount of dollars per article. I do good work and meet my deadlines. Either I’m respected or there’s no job. I’ve only quit a job once and that was when the buyer started moving up deadlines on me, wanting material days and weeks ahead of schedule. I would quit that job again under the same circumstances.

That’s what I do for a living. Not all of my writing is for online buyers. I write for magazines, too. They pay much better but it’s nice to have the regular online work.

I always wanted to be a writer when I was growing up but I never imagined that I would be living such a precarious life. I thought you had to have a regular paycheck and work in an office. I like security. For a long time I resisted the idea of being a freelancer because it is up and down in terms of earning a living. Fortunately the Internet has made it much easier to work at home now. Of course, it would be nice to have a huge stash of money in a savings account. I should work on that a little more.