Yeah, I work from home. I’ve been self-employed now for almost ten years. And god, when you put it like that, a guy feels old – was 2000 really almost a decade ago? You have got to be kidding me.
So a few days back, Kristi told me about a recent conversation in her classroom. I imagine someone noticed that I was tagging along on the Berkeley trip and wondered just what in the heck Mrs. Warren’s husband did for a living, to be able to just take a day off and ride along on his wife’s field trip.
“He’s a writer,” she said. The next question is usually, “What kind of books does he write?”, as though the only successful writers in the world are book authors. Kristi preempted it: “Mr. Warren writes for businesses – brochures, websites, technical documentation, anything like that they need. Businesses go to him to write that stuff for them.”
“And so your husband just works from home? And he can just take off whenever he wants?”
“Well, not whenever he wants. Sometimes he’s on hard deadline and has to work late getting a big project done. Sometimes he just spends the morning drinking coffee and playing Burnout Paradise or whatever the hell he does when I’m not at home.”
“And he doesn’t have a boss?”
“He works for his clients. But no, he works for himself.”
“How’d he hook up THAT sweet gig??”
Long story, man. Long story.
But then again, once you get to a certain age, isn’t everything a long story?
Truth was, I woke up one day many years ago and looked at my life and said to myself, I’ve had enough of this crap. Think Peter from Office Space. And unpleasant things happened: a friend died of cancer, another old friendship painfully crumbled, and of course, some planes were flown into some buildings and knocked a whole lot of people (including me) out of the complacency of the 1990s. I didn’t really “hook up” anything, much less a sweet gig – I just changed my life one day. Everything else after that was hard work, sacrifice, determination, a few smart decisions and a fair amount of luck.
I just decided to not give up, and that decision hasn’t killed me yet. Everything else was a sidebar.
The writing business – our business, now – has had a down year from 2007 (thanks to practically taking the summer off for the wedding), but we’ve had a great October. That makes the third month straight of record numbers. We just the other day signed on a new client in supply chain logistics; they sell GPS tracking solutions to trucking fleets. I’m really excited about this one – their business just cuts across so many verticals, making them an ideal portfolio job. Every client like them usually leads to a dozen more high quality clients, right behind them. We now have a full docket of high quality clients, boding really well for 2009.
So anyway, today, Halloween, I’m in a lull. Half a dozen clients with open projects, but most of them are on their thumbs for one reason or another; two new clients won’t officially launch until next week. So today I’m mainly sitting here in the home office, rewriting the code on the business website and our back office organizational software, tightening up the organization. I’ve got a movie (Bubba HoTep) playing in one corner of one of my big widescreen computer monitors; I’m keeping an eye on email and generally just drinking coffee and waking up. I might crack open Burnout later if I need a video game break.
Okay. So maybe it is a sweet gig. Most days, at least.
Bad day at the beach is still better than a good day at the office – know what I mean?