My Nineteenth Week as a Budding Author

In October last year my intentions to leave a proper job and follow the path of self employment were broadcast to friends, family and work colleagues alike. I must confess that there were not many naysayers. Yes, there was some bored resignation, a few “tuts” and a decent sprinkling of “good riddance”, but in the main most people seemed to think that working for yourself is pretty much an ideal scenario. Especially when it involves your passion and is entirely unrelated to XML.

Well it’s week nineteen now and I’ve given some time to reflection on the working life of the self employed home worker. I’ve realised that the office bound have never had it so good. To illustrate this fact I’ll take you through a typical working day.

The alarm goes off at 7am and we all congregate in the kitchen for breakfast, well when I say “we all”, three of us do whilst a fourth family member lies in bed and groans. This is the family member who has the enviable talent to being able to sleep at any given moment, in any given situation, for huge lengths of time. The rest of us as borderline insomniacs. We eat breakfast whilst shouting loudly up the stairs until a mass of hair and wrong-way-round school uniform appears at the bottom.

I calmly read the paper whilst the others frantically search for work passes, phones, homework, shoes, keys, PE kit and Shergar. I’d help, but the most effective way of finding anything is to ask my wife, and she is the one looking for the stuff in the first place. Asking her would possibly create some dangerous recursive reaction that physicists would find difficult to explain. So I usually provide my stock line of “Where did you see it last?” and go back to the headlines.

Suddenly, they’re gone. I’m alone in my dressing gown covered in toast. There’s nobody at the school gate ready to berate me if I’m late. There’s no factory clock or office manager or security guard to report me for tardy time keeping. Just me and some toast. The first difficult task of the day is to motivate myself to get on and do some work, oh..and get dressed and shave and stuff, it is so tempting to simply park myself in front of the computer dressed only in pants. Would you feel dirty if you knew I’d typed this nude?

Anyway, eventually I make it to my little office and stare down at the desk. It’s dusty, disorganised and covered in crap. Office workers have cleaners and clear desk policies to ensure that each working day they arrive to a pristine workspace ready to rock. Me, I have to sort out the mess from the day before myself. This provides a nice thirty minute distraction as I shuffle paper, reorganise my stationary, put my entire cycling literature collection back on the shelves and desperately search for the “to do” list.

And here’s another area where we differ. When I was at work I had managers and colleagues and charts and plans and calendars and all sorts of other stuff that meant when I arrived at work I knew what to do. If I didn’t, there was someone there to tell me. In fact prioritising tasks in the office was simple, all you had to do was to listen. People would be shouting at you from all directions, across the office, down the phone, by text, via increasingly impatient email or by proxy using a carefully crafted “grass” to drop you in the crap. All you had to do was sum the volume of moaning on each task and address them in order of loudness.

I have to do this prioritisation myself and the list is often something like:-

• write 5000 words lucidly and in a grammatically correct fashion
• carefully lay out a chapter
• construct striking graphics that fit with the theme
• diligently research a geographical or historic feature
• write an awesome code routine
• plan a cycling route
• update website

The following items are never on the “to do” list:-

• browse the forum at Singletrackworld.com
• check Facebook status of friends
• read tweets of all of the twitter accounts I follow
• stroll to bike shop, purchase cycling components

So after I have completed all of the second list I stare forlornly at the first wishing I could delegate it. And there’s another facet of office life I miss, delegation. It used to make me smile when my boss advised me that the key to success was delegation. If this is followed through, the lowest echelon in any company will do 100% of all work with tiers of managers above them furiously delegating down the tree. Which is how it actually works for me as all tasks without exception are delegated my way.

Eventually I pick the easiest option from the list and get on with it. This lasts about ten minutes before I remember something of interest in the fridge. So work is parked yet again in favour of snack construction and being away from the office I can eat whatever I want without any kind of derision.

I’ve had marmite on toast..with scrambled egg, garlic sausage with apple and salad cream sandwich and an amazing delicacy, fruit yoghurt with jaffa cakes crumbled in. All of these are wrong, each one would have resulted in a week’s worth of piss taking were I working in an office. But working at home means I can eat what I want and whenever I want, which has an obvious downside, an obscene calorific intake.

Somewhere near midday the postman arrives replete with a sack full of bills. I then get to spend an afternoon, as many freelancers do, hiding behind the sofa hoping that the bills won’t find me. But they always somehow manage it as I end up tempted by the accompanying Maplin special offers leaflet advertising a USB weather forecasting station that is also a microwave. In the old days when I worked in an office, bills were not such a huge problem as they simply deducted themselves from the salary I was given for turning up each day and arguing a lot.

Now the bills have an almost one to one relationship with my savings account. So each hurts that little bit more than it used to. It’s at this point that I need someone to moan at. But the house does not have a watercooler, and even if it did, I would be the only one standing there. There is no doubt that working from home comes with the significant disadvantage that the only company you have is your own. Which is a problem if you’re a miserable bugger like me.

To make it worse, most corporates frown upon social networking such as Facebook, Twitter or anything that isn’t directly generating shareholder value. People who work in proper offices are not to be trusted. Therefore, I can only chat online with my super-geeky mates who have hacked their way round the ban. Which is a problem as all they want to discuss is function prototyping or episodes of The Big Bang Theory, they have no time for my various woes.

And so another afternoon will pass with me talking to myself or the radio. I flit around the various tasks that need to be done and restrain myself from revisiting the fridge just in case there is something that I haven’t eaten. If the sun’s out, I’ll go for a ride.

Going for a ride instead of working sounds like a perfect existence. However, it is not as simple as that. Going for a ride is basically procrastination, whatever I was doing or was about to do will now not be done and I’ll have to do it later. My office colleagues are typically done with work at 6pm and therefore free to watch the One Show without any guilt at all. My wasted hours messing about on the bike force me to work an evening shift, which means Eastenders and Coronation Street are mysteries to me.

There are also a whole myriad of other benefits that I miss out on as a home worker:-

• the annual appraisal - now I have to call myself an idiot once a year instead of having someone else do it for me
• human resource policies - I have nobody there telling me that I am valued whilst handing out more money to other people
• car park spaces - I have one and am unable to moan constantly about the lack of it
• pension - actually, that is not strictly true, I have plenty of other places to put money where I will never see it again

If you’ve managed to read this far you’ll understand that being self employed has its pitfalls. Your daytime social life is compromised, your TV viewing habits are restricted and you’ll eat all manner of strange concoctions that Greggs will never purvey. You’ll go cycling when you should be working and there’s nobody there to sue if you feel a little bit left out in the workplace.

So while you are all sheltered in your air conditioned office, receiving praise and direction from your manager, eating proper sandwiches and looking forward to an evening with Peggy Mitchell. Think of me sat in my pants suffering for my art.

Dave

13th May 2011

WEEK 20 >>>>>>>