It’s snowing. A little hard to believe, but, yep, it’s snowing in parts of the state. Here, it’s just raining, but we’re teetering around freezing overnight, so snow’s a real possibility. I’m on this weird sleep cycle where I keep falling asleep around 8:30 and waking up at 2, so I’m up all night. Yesterday I had this train wreck of obligations, requiring me to drive into the city mid-day, which meant I’d either need to kill time in town all afternoon (which means I’m not working, which means things piling up on my desk and no money coming in), or I’d have to choose between the afternoon stuff (which culdn;t be avoided) or the evening stuff. With gas heading towards $3.60 per gallon, living out in the styx was a really dumb move. I keep thinking abut Adam West’s Batcave, 13 miles from Gotham, which, of course, meant a 20-minute lag time in Batman’s response to any real emergency. I’m trying to consolidate trips so I don’t waste gas going back and forth, but, of course, people in my life (1) don’t get that I live way outside town and /or (2) don’t care that I live way outside town.
I’ve also discovered, late in life, that few “regular” people actually understand writers or designers or, frankly, creative people of any stripe. I have to treat everybody like a child, corralling their expectations because they live in a 9-5 world and I don’t. And, most of these folks do not understand that dragging me into town takes me away from my work and forces me to stay up all night to catch up. Down at the church, they just schedule and re-schedule and schedule meeting after meeting, and I come off as Reverend Grouch by saying they have to streamline this process so we’re not being constantly dragged down to the church. The combination of loss time behind the desk and burning up $3.50 gas is a killer. Which forces me to be obstreperous: no, I am not coming in Thursday, I was in Wednesday. I’ll be back Friday. Or it can wait until Tuesday.
Nobody seems to understand I work here. I am not lounging by the pool or watching Oprah. I am at work or I am sleeping. That’s about all I do. Making me come to yur office is, typically, a fairly obnoxious waste of my time. And, it’s expensive. 9.95 out of 10 times, a meeting I’ve been dragged to in town could have happened over the phone.
Leaving the house means an hour of Monk-like ADD-driven tasks, including grooming and dressing—things you don’t need to do when you work in your pajamas. Then, whatever it is in town plus the inevitable delays and additions and bump-intos, which can lead to lunches or dinners or what have you, and by the time you’re in your driveway again, it’s night and you’ve lost the entire day. Plus, once you get home, there is the decompression and reinitializing of your creative process, which usually eats up, minimum, another hour. Even a short trip will tend to cost me half a day of work.
Worst case scenario: the psycho client who insists I come into town so he can yell at me about not having finished his job yet. The very epitome of counterintuitive disconnect between process and goal.
8 Comments
First of all....welcome back and thanks to Him for your recovery!
I'm chuckling but definitely can cosign with your angst. I'm a WFH'er as well as being in the ministry. And yes, because I'm not in an 'office', everybody expects that I can drop my work, take their calls or come to them so that their issues should become my issues for as long as their issues remain their issues. I find myself calling more and more on His discernment to say...You know, when you're ready, then I'll ride the course with you. Until then......
But enough of that... suffice to say that I'm very happy that the drought is over and glad that the Right Reverend is back in da house!
scrawled by Gavri_El | May 24, 2007 4:16 PM
The thing that drives me crazy is when people ask what I do. My parents -- MY PARENTS -- cannot cogently explain what I do, nor can my in-laws, my children, or some of my friends. Some of them apparently think I'm a photographer. How hard is it to understand: "I'm a designer; I design the way things (in my case, ads and DVD boxes) look."?
The lost time thing doesn't, sadly, go away when you work in an office, BTW.
scrawled by Richard Howe | May 24, 2007 4:25 PM
What're you working on?
scrawled by Blaine | May 25, 2007 12:32 PM
Oh, Boy does this hit home.
My wife and I are self-employed and run our own business from home. Until about a year and a half ago I lived near my in-laws. One week my mother-in-law got the idea that she wanted to re-paint her kitchen, dining room, and hallway. She asked my wife and I to help and we agreed.
The project ended up taking a week. Still, we were glad to help (even though money was tight at the time and we really couldn't afford to take that much time away from our work). But here is the REAL kicker. My new father-in-law (my M-i-L recently remarried) was OFF WORK that week. He was home, watching television, the whole time I was there painting his house.
And not only did he not help us paint, but he actually lost his temper and complained about how we were stinking up the house with paint fumes. Later, he apologized, saying that he really just felt bad that we were painting his house for him. But he still never offered to actually help us.
And all the time I could have been in my office working on paying projects we had waiting for us.
scrawled by Eric | May 25, 2007 4:35 PM
Yep. This is what I’m talking about. The overwhelming number of people in my life, I’m talking in the high 90 percentile, have the attitude that, well, he makes his own hours so he can do [insert task here] during the day. And then become indignant and hostile when I don’t do [insert task here]. Very few people have any concept of how difficult it is to make a living working from home or what the discipline is: that you have to treat it like a normal job. That means I have to stay off the phone and not idle the day away chatting and hanging out. I’m telling you, 99% of the people in my life simply can’t understand this and are routinely ticked off because I don’t take calls while I’m working.
Even worse, I have people who assume I’m free all day and can do [task], not realizing or even caring that every time I leave my house I am spending money instead of making a living; that it is costing me money to come and do [task]. Virtually no one I now gets it that I am leaving work, taking a day or days off from work, to help them do [task], and that, unlike their desk jobs, I don’t get paid when I take days off. I don’t have vacation days or sick days or personal days. It’s not like calling in sick on your job or taking a couple vacation days. I mean, can most of you even imagine taking a week—a *week*-- off from your day job to paint your mother in law’s kitchen? Or using up all of your vacation time helping some friend out with some project? So much that now you have no vacation days and you’ve possibly been docked some pay, and your friend barely even remembers to *thank* you?
This is, precisely, the story of my life.
Blaine: various and sundry. I write, I design, I build websites. I’d rather not get into what I do or who my clients are online.
scrawled by priest | May 25, 2007 5:22 PM
Dawg,is it me...or did you not already come up with the idea of Captain America passing away,forcing THE FALCON to travel back in time to prevent CAP'S death in the first place? And is it me...or did Marvel just completely and utterly wipe your idea from any form of continuity like Wanda Maximoff sneezed at it? And is it me...or wasn't Wanda Maximoff IN YOUR STORY? Is it me...or was 616 FALCON finally getting some long overdue respect--since his miniseries I think,which SOME ONE wrote,ahem--and not looking like a chump or THE LEAST CAPABLE OF CAPTAIN AMERICA'S SIDEKICKS?
Naaahhhhh...maybe it was just me...
scrawled by supreme illuminati | May 25, 2007 7:25 PM
Sadly, all true. Falc goes back to WWII to try and change history and ends up fighting the Nazis or saving Bucky or something that makes current Cap not exist anymore. So, then he has to fix things, to re-create Cap by *causing* Bucky to die.
Meanwhile, there’d have been all of these conspiracy theories and agencies mobilizing because they know Caps' death couldn't have been what it would have been in my story--a freak accident (a thug shooting at Sam accidentally hits Steve in the head). Like Oswald in the book depository, no one will accept the idea Cap died because of some street punk, and all manner of hell breaks loose, escalating to a global conflict.
And, of course, the Anti-Cap would be trying to take Cap's place, and on and on. I had a bunch of ideas. I try not to be bitter about this stuff, but, really, this is why I'm not writing comics. You slave all day over a hot PC and then the company says, "No thanks," to your idea.
Only to do it anyway with somebody else.
It would only be annoying if it were the first time this had happened, but it’s happened several times, mainly because there are only but so many ideas out there and somebody is bound to come up with, “Hey, let’s kill Cap!” But, this is, like, the third time something like this has happened to me. It’s not the *idea* that’s bad, it’s *who has it.* And that’s the shitty part about the business.
scrawled by priest | May 25, 2007 10:31 PM
Priest, you hermit. You have a comic strip counterpart (sort of) named "OMAR" from Cory Thomas' "Watch Your Head" daily strip.
http://planetcory.com/cast.html
(click on the guy in the Black shirt)
scrawled by Kristopher | June 4, 2007 1:00 PM