Today is the first day of cutting back to part-time at the call center. I’ll be working 9-1, M-F for the bank, and also one day every other weekend there. The rest of the time I’ll be trolling the net looking for writing projects. Right now I’m finishing up two projects writing articles about hypnosis and neuro-linguistic programming (a.k.a. NLP), and two projects writing short copy for sales websites.
Writing is still a job, and I wouldn’t say it’s for everyone, it’s demanding. But so far I’m very excited about freelancing. I like having choices about what to write about, I like getting paid for writing, I like researching and learning about new things, and knowing that my shift of taking abuse on the phone at the bank is getting shorter and shorter with each passing minute. I like working alone on my own schedule. I like all the possibilities and all the newness.
So far, out of a dozen projects, I’ve had one slow payer but few other problems, which really surprises me. I know it won’t all be roses, but so far, in general, it hasn’t been the bed of constant rejection and angst I expected. The bank, on the other hand, gets uglier and uglier. I think there is a real chance that it will not survive in its present state. A friend of mine there sold $750,000 last month and was rewarded with $7. Seven bucks. That was her commission. And I was feeling bad about my lousy fifty bucks. I only sold $430,000, but there is this new formula for commission that has to do with the phases of the moon, how much your grandmother weighs, eye color, time of day, ratio of booked accounts to waist circumference, and changes in the magnetic field of the earth.
In other words, no one knows how the hell commission works there.
I am on probation for attendance, which I expected and fully deserve, but what I didn’t realize until my own probation was how many other people are on probation and how many things you can be on probation for. Why don’t they just say straight up, “You can work here for a year or two, but after that, seriously, we’re gonna find a reason to fire you.” This seems to be the corporate strategy in general these days: hire ‘em and fire ‘em before they get a chance to retire or before they want raises or promotions or some other unreasonable thing like that. It’s planned obsolescence only with people.
A good book on the topic is Bait & Switch by Barbara Ehrenreich. In it she details her journey trying to find a middle-income job after a corporate layoff. It’s a pretend journey–she’s a freelance writer in real life and wants a corporate job about as much as she wants herpes, but she wanted to see what the search process was like. And what she discovered was, the search process is endless and mostly you have to take something like a call center job or a job where you have to wear a hair net.
Not that it’s all that easy to get a hairnet job these days either. The economy is looking worser and worser. It will be interesting today to see whether Wall Street will delude itself into another mini-rally or jump off another little bridge. What I really loved was Ben Bernanke’s recent reassurance to Congress that the economy is basically solid, that he was ready to do whatever was necessary to encourage growth (read: more rate cuts), and that oh yeah, there may be some bank failures.
BANK FAILURES?!?!?!?!?
You know, it takes a truly steady hand to reassure people economically and talk about bank failure all in the same sentence. Most people equate bank failures with bread lines and the song, “Brother Can You Spare a Dime.” Since dimes are currently worth about a quarter for the silver involved, it’s a safe bet that, come to blows, nobody will be sparing them this time around.
Speaking of time, it’s time to put in mine. But, as the governor of California once said, “I’ll be back.”
