An Honest Day’s Work (Is Not for Me)
A while back I worked for a gifts and housewares store that gave this blog many good posts, mostly about greeting cards. It was not a bad job, as far as retail goes. I still live within walking distance of the shop, and from time to time if they get short-staffed they give me a call, since I usually am working from home and pretty much on my own schedule.
But man, was volunteering to cover for the shipping guys for a whole week a mistake.
Not that the work is particularly hard or anything. It involves a predictable amount of picking cardboard boxes up and then putting cardboard boxes down, which sure, is not great fun after three or four hours, but as far as manual labor goes it’s on the pretty easy end of the scale.
No, the problem is that I’ve completely forgotten how to organize my life around actual work shifts.
I write from home, mostly. My schedule is basically my own every day. I work plenty of hours, but I work them intermittently, interspersed with breaks to feed myself, read a book, pet the cats, drink myself into a stupor; pretty much whatever I want. As long as I make deadline it’s all good. It makes it really easy to get long to-do lists checked off, but hard to manage even basic tasks if I suddenly have to be efficient about my time management.
So that whole quitting your day job thing I recommended a while back? I stand by that, now that I’ve had a while to compare the options. Trying to be a writer and a worker and a functional housemate is too much for any one over-educated dilettante (I don’t even have to be a spouse/partner anymore, just a tolerable flatmate, and it’s still hard).
And yes, now that you mention it, it did take me until after 5:00 PM to get a blog post up today. You see what I mean?
Hell with this whole “honest day’s work” thing, f’serious.
Totally true. I do have a day job, but I’m in sales so it’s very flexible. I cannot wait for the day when I can just write, make some money and play with my cat as well.
Day jobsreally fuck the whole thing up, agreed.
“Some” is the operative word in “write, make some money, and play with my cat,” but yeah. You can get enough to scrape by if you don’t mind a lot of poverty under your genteel.
We really appreciate you pitching in this week, Geoffrey — even if it did reek havoc with your real life!
Ha! The problem, I assure you, is me and not you. You can tell I’ve been setting my own hours too long when I’m all “Aaaaaaaah, gaaawwwwd, I’ma have to cut my breakfast date off at like 11 AM so I can get in and help at the store, jeeeeeez.”
We should all have such problems, neh?
Haha I write from home as well, and make very little doing it. Thinking about doing a day job anywhere else makes me feel a bit panicked because I am so used to this…at the same time, I do like change as well. We’ll see. Great to see it re-afirrmed though
Oh, I don’t make much myself, but enough to keep me out of both the poorhouse and the cubicle farm. For now it’ll do. And I figure no one my age has a really GOOD job, just “shitty with benefits” versus “shitty without benefits but I’m not an evil corporate drone.” Until Gen Y starts seeing some decent opportunities I might as well keep working on things I like.
I agree!