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Careers

Work is a place…

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…not an activity.

Over at the Empowering Mom blog, author Tisha Tolar posts a thoughtful and interesting rumination on the way people react when they learn someone is stepping off the job treadmill to start a business—especially a work-at-home business. She takes the negativity that you can encounter (especially when you first get started) as a manifestation of jealousy.

There’s no question that people say the strangest things to freelancers. A friend’s mother, for example, asked her when she was going to get “a real job.” Said friend’s pretend job entailed stringing for Time Magazine (a nicely paid gig), regularly writing for The New York Times, generating 30 to 40 column inches a week for a Scripps-Howard business journal, running a successful public-relations practice, and (oh, by the way) raising two children and functioning as an active corporate wife for a successful lawyer.

I don’t think, though, that jealousy is quite the word for it. It’s more that people are trapped in a specific mindset and can’t break free from it. For most people, work is a place, not an activity. You’re “at work” when you’re at the office, on a jobsite, down at the shop…never mind that half the time you’re standing around the water cooler, a quarter of the time you’re out front smoking, and the rest of the time you’re building a championship score at Spider Solitaire on your office computer. When you’re “at home” you can’t be working. Can you?

This is a cultural box, like all the other cultural boxes we use to compartmentalize our lives. Most of us find it difficult to climb out of any given box and see the world from a new perspective. The result is that most people genuinely, truly cannot imagine that you’re gainfully employed if your workplace and your home coincide. To their minds, if you claim to be working while you’re physically at home, you’re in the wrong box.

During the several periods when I worked as a freelance writer out of my home, I published four books and more articles than I can count, spoke at endless writers’ conferences, and taught feature writing on the college level. Despite a busy schedule and some high-profile success, the wrong-box phenomenon manifested itself over and over.

There was the time, for example, that my son was in preschool and the school’s volunteer room mother was trying to round up moms to drive vanloads of kids to a farm south of the city for a Hallowe’en pumpkinfest. She called every mother who had been foolish enough not to provide a business telephone number. I used to repeat my home number as my business number, because that’s where editors and clients called me during the daytime; when you do that, people assume you’re not working. She called me while I was on deadline for a national magazine and demanded that I “volunteer” to drive kids to this farm.

I explained that I could not, because I was working on a job and I had to meet a deadline.

This simply did not register with her. She persisted. I tried again to explain that I couldn’t drop what I was doing to drive kiddies around the landscape. She grew angry. She insisted that I certainly could take a full day off my job (because, understand: in her mind I didn’t have a job) to drive children to the pumpkin farm. By the time I finally scraped her off the telephone, she was furious!

At the time this incident occurred, I was writing one feature-length article a month for a city magazine, one to three short pieces a month for each of two monthlies, 30 to 60 column inches a week for a business newspaper, and one to three feature-length articles a month for regional and national magazines. None of that activity came under the heading of an unpaid hobby.

This effect—the “you must be eating bon-bons in front of the soap operas” reaction—is particularly pronounced where women are concerned. Men face a slightly different response (the “what kind of lazy worthless fruitcake of a bum ARE you, anyway” question). Women, when they’re working out of a home office, are assumed to have nothing better to do than socialize, volunteer, and babysit.

The most extreme episode that I can remember came the morning my son committed the heinous crime of uttering the word “fart” on the kindergarten playground. I was on deadline for an article that had to be finished that day when the school principal called on the phone to announce that I had to come and pick up my child forthwith.

I explained that I had a job I had to finish, and that I would come and get him as soon as I could.

No, he said, he was being sent home and I had to come and get him RIGHT NOW. I said, look: I’m a journalist. I write on deadline. I’m writing a project that has to be done today. If I miss my deadline, I will lose my client—the editor will not hire me to do any further work for him.

“Well, that’s fine, but you have to come and get him right now,” he said.

Understand: Editors and publishers have no commitment to freelance writers. You’re not an employee. Some of these people never see your face. All you have to do is miss one deadline, and you’ll never get another assignment from that editor.

I called one of our adult sitters and arranged to drop the kid with her while I finished the job. Traipsed over to the school, drove him down to her house, and raced back to my computer.

An hour later as I was sweltering through the feature, phone rang again: babysitter.

“He hasn’t stopped crying since you left him. You have to come and pick him up.”

Yes.

The kid was so anguished by being thrown out of school for half a day, he was beside himself. He was just frantic, so much so that our sitter, an accomplished mother and grandmother, could do nothing to console him. So…

Of course, I missed the deadline.

By midafternoon, I was so furious—especially after I got off the phone from my audibly irked editor—that I called my husband to vent.

He called the school principal to inquire what was going on, and in the course of the conversation, he explained in exactly the same words I had used that I worked as a freelance journalist, that I had to make my deadlines, that I had to finish an article that was due that day, and that picking up my son before school was out meant that I would miss my deadline and risk losing an important client.

The principal said—get this!—that if he had known that, he wouldn’t have insisted I come and get my son.

Two phenemona were engaged there:

1. The ineffable inaudibility of the female voice; and
2. The impossibility of conceiving that a person who works at home is working.

It’s not jealousy. It’s not meanness. It’s not even stupidity. It’s plain old social convention. You can’t beat it. You just have to learn to ignore it or work around it.

Discombobulated

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Ugh! Spent the entire darned day yesterday building a package to sell The Copyeditor’s Desk to university presses. I hate writing stuff like that.

It’s exactly the same as writing a résumé and cover letter to apply for a job, and just as stressful: not only what do I say and how do I say it, but what is the most effective way to structure a pitch, what do they need and how do I talk about that instead of talking about me, when do I say X and how far do I push Y and how do I get something that should be in the emphatic last position in a graf out of the freaking MIDDLE of the graf without coming up with something that sounds incoherent and….augh! And then I had to targetrésumés for both me and Tina and tweak our track record so the reader will easily spot the work we do that’s relevant to his or her needs…gasp!

After all that, I have one, count it, ONE package ready to mail. Meanwhile, I didn’t get a lick of work done for GDU. I expect this will go easier for the other three presses whose ramparts we need to assault this week: I set up the draft material in boilerplate sections, so that really the only segment that will need to be rewritten to customize for each press is the first paragraph or two. The routine is very much like applying for jobs. The first cover letter is torture, but once you’ve got it on paper, you can reuse a lot of it with relatively light revisions. Ditto therésumé: when you start with the “list of accomplishments” or “relevant skills,” you can adjust those to move the job description’s desiderata higher on the list.

Speaking of job applications, I need to do a bunch more of those, too, in light of Our Beloved President’s recent online fireside chat.

Unfortunately, though, I’m going to be forced to actually work today, as extreme as that sounds. Two new math articles have been sitting on my flashdrive since Friday.

And it’s already 6:37 in the morning. Dang! Gotta run! 😯

Layoffs? Market crash? Great Depression II?

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It’s after 4:00 p.m. and no news has leaked from this morning’s meeting that was supposed to announce the occupational demise of all us year-to-year academic professionals. Sorta looks like my spies were right and my friend’s were wrong.

Meanwhile, a different chunk of the sky has stopped falling on our heads. Hevvin help us, the Dow Jones closed up 936.42 points—that’s 11 percent—and all of us have avoided having to put down our deposits on a campsite in Bushville (the latter-day Hooverville).

The outcome of either of these two ongoing dramas remains to be seen. Given the market’s vertiginous volatility, we all know it could drop 11 percent (or more…much more) tomorrow or the next day after tomorrow or next week. And given the mysterious ways in which the Great Desert University works, we peons all could be laid off any day in the same time frame.

So what does it all mean for you & me? Well, I dunno about you. But I’m not holding my breath until my savings return to their former level. Sure, I’ll be glad if they regain their value (since I’ll be needing them in a year or two…or a week or two). But I don’t expect anything.

One thing about pessimists: our surprises are always pleasant.

As for employment: your employer may be slightly less wacko than GDU, but my employer has wacked its last wack where I’m concerned. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that I’m rowing a leaky canoe. I intend to keep my job applications out there and add a few more to the mix. The first really good offer that comes across my desk will take me off the bailing team and put my feet on dry land.

The single targeted hire who was courted to take over our sister program has never bothered to respond to the (very generous!) offer sent to her a few weeks ago. One can only assume she’s waiting for another offer that she must consider more desirable, placing ours in the second fiddle’s chair. If this woman doesn’t accept, that program is as good as gone. And when it goes, our office will be at huge risk: nay, let’s admit we probably will go, too. The soonest we could be closed down is the end of December, when the other program may shut down if no accommodation with the interim director (who hates living in Arizona) can be made. The latest will be the end of next summer, when all our research assistants will graduate (oh so conveniently!) at once. If no Scholarly Publishing Program remains to staff our office, I will have to hire from the English department and then teach the new RAs the equivalent of a semester course in basic editing and another semester course in advanced editing (oh yes, all at once) with no increase in pay.

And guess what I’m ain’t a-gunna do?

So. If a bullet was whistling through the air and I somehow dodged it, I’m left to calculate how to deal with the sand dune collapsing under my feet. At least falling sand gives one a little more time to engineer an escape.

Interview No. 1

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Yesterday afternoon I had the first interview in the new job search, for a program manager’s position at a prominent local cultural landmark. It seemed to go well. I think they liked me, and it certainly is a job I could do well. On the other hand, I’m pretty long in the tooth. The East Valley Tribune just laid off 120 employees, and so a great raft of people in “communications” will swarm across the land in search of jobs.

If I don’t get this job or something like it very quickly, I’m going to be in deep trouble. With the market tanking, my savings will not support me, not by a long shot. Apparently it can take up to three months after you apply for Social Security to start. If it is true that credit is pretty much nonexistent, selling my house or even borrowing against it to get enough to live on is an unlikely prospect. Unlike GDU’s HR people, the UofA tells retirees that RASL—the amount the state pays for unused sick leave—is considered earned income, not a retirement benefit, and so is taxable at your regular rate. This would cut the annual amount I’m supposed to get for that over the next three years to around $4,000. COBRA alone will cost $5,000 a year. I may end up without health insurance, since I may not be able to pay for it and also eat.

I do not know what I am going to do if I don’t get another job quickly.

At any rate, after the interview I wandered around the grounds and ended up in a monarch butterfly exhibit. There I met a meeter & greeter who was all alone and happy to deliver her lecture on the wonders of butterflies. When I remarked that I had just interviewed for a job, she said she had started there as a volunteer and wangled her way into paying work. She said she loved it; the place is a great place to work.

News from GDU is uniformly negative. The library director at the West campus has been replaced by a part-time interim director whose job, we are told, is to figure out what to cut. Librarians no longer have a budget to buy books, and the president is trying to spread the West campus’s library budget among all four campuses. Staff expect widespread layoffs in the near future.

While strolling around the gardens, I thought wouldn’t it be wonderful to work for a place whose management you don’t hate!

Well, we’ll see. I don’t hold out much hope. But nothing ventured, nothing gained. Here’s what it looks like at the place where I’d like to work.


The Continuing Saga…

1. Unemployment for Christmas?
2. Does any of this have meaning for individuals?
3. Rumors start to fly
4. On the trail of the elusive job
5. Beating the layoff stress
6. How low can I go?
7. Interview No. 1

How low can I go?

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Tomorrow’s job interview is with a nonprofit organization. So neat is this outfit that I had earmarked it as the first place I would do volunteer work after retiring. The job sounds like more fun than life, and frankly, if I could I would pay them to let me work there. However, I can’t afford that: for the next three or four years, I still hafta make a living.

Because it’s a nonprofit and the ad is for someone with a bachelor’s degree and three years’ experience, I’m assuming they’re budgeted for a low salary. Of course, GDU is a nonprofit, of a sort; and what I earn is pretty middling. Others whose jobs are related to my kind of work earn more. Nevertheless, my salary is exactly at the total income for an average four-person family in Arizona—meaning, I imagine, that I earn about twice the average Arizonan’s wage, since most families have two earners.

That notwithstanding, my expenses have expanded to fill all my income’s available space. So, if this proposed new employer offers me half of what I’m earning, I can’t accept it, because I wouldn’t have a chance of living on it. However, because I’m over 59 1/2 and can draw down my IRAs, I could get by on a significant pay cut. Drawing down the amount my advisor and I had planned when I retire would make this possible. And since I could in theory retire right now, there’s a certain demented sense to the idea of taking a small draw-down to supplement a reduced salary.

A reasonable amount to expect from this source is about $10,000 a year, since I’m already using part of said planned drawdown to cover my share of the Investment House mortgage.

I figured out how much gross salary I would need to get by in several scenarios. The amount I’d need ranges from $47,000 to $50,720, depending on a variety of circumstances. Then I estimated net pay on those amounts, given that my current net pay is 63% of gross. From these estimates, I calculated how much I would get monthly, and what a single paycheck would be if paid bimonthly and if paid biweekly.

Charmingly Excel crashed when I tried to get rid of the page break lines in one worksheet (does anyone know how to un-show those things?). This lost all the data I’d worked on today…though I’d have sworn I saved at some point along the line. Must not have.

At any rate, if M’hijito pays $100/month more toward the Investment House mortgage (he says he could cover more than that, actually) and I pay off the Renovation Loan, I still would have enough in savings to make it possible to live on the net income from a $47,000 salary, and to do so without serious pain.

Although the Renovation Loan’s monthly payment is fairly modest—only $170 a month—during the winter months it’s my largest monthly bill, and during the summer, the second largest. In addition, I’m setting aside $204 a month to pay toward principal. I haven’t been paying it directly to the principal each month, because I foresaw something like the present chain of events and figured I’d better save all the paydown money in cash accounts to double as emergency funds. The monthly set-aside figure—the maximum I can pay after all my other bills are covered—brings the ding on my monthly income to $374, which for me is significant. It’s twice my largest winter bill and $150 more than my largest summer bill. Get rid of that, and I can live on a smaller salary.

Well, we may find out tomorrow what the proposed new employer can pay. Let’s hope it’s enough!

The Continuing Saga…

1. Unemployment for Christmas?
2. Does any of this have meaning for individuals?
3. Rumors start to fly
4. On the trail of the elusive job
5.Beating the layoff stress
6. How low can I go?
7. Interview No. 1

Beating the layoff stress

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For the first six or eight days after I learned about the rumored layoffs, I felt so stressed that my chest hurt. One day at the office I had to lie down on the floor for a few minutes when an anxiety attack started to come on. Determined not to end up in the ER again, I managed to get the feeling that I was about to pass out under control with some breathing and relaxation exercises. But that didn’t stop the scary ache in the chest.

Today, though, I’m feeling a lot better: no pounding heart, no chest pain, no sense of oxygen starvation, no distractibility, and no sleeplessness. For sure, yesterday’s call from one of the employers I applied to helped. Even if I don’t get the job, at least now I have some hope that my age won’t disqualify me from every job I ask for. That was a big worry.

Also, with amazing speed I’m getting more and more comfortable with the idea of not working for GDU—even if it means taking a lower-paying job. Matter of fact, that prospect not only looks less scary, it’s starting to look downright welcome. Although I personally have had relatively little to complain about (other than the months-long PeopleSoft fiasco, the [probably illegal] reneging on an approved job offer I made to a prospective employee, and the overall toxic atmosphere on the campus where I taught), I certainly have seen the administration treat many of my coworkers abominably.

The prospect of being somewhere else begins to look more attractive. So does the idea of a new job with new things to learn and do.

I’m glad I started the job search before any university-wide announcement came down and before I knew whether this next round of lay-offs will apply to me. Just doing something to help yourself, rather than hunkering paralyzed in the headlight while the train bears down on you, goes a long way to make you feel better. It gives you a little sense of accomplishment, and it jump-starts the process you’re going to have to put into gear soon, anyway.

The first cover letter and résumé took a good five or six hours to put together! I thought I was gunna die. If every job application took that much time, how was I going to manage the work for the day job? To say nothing of all the freelance work The Copyeditor’s Desk has taken on?

However, the next application only took 30 or 40 minutes, and neither of the other two took any longer. Because the jobs I’m seeking (with exception of driving the zoo train…) are in the same general family of work and they’re all at nonprofits or colleges, tweaking the cover letter and resuméis pretty easy. It’s just a matter of writing new first and last paragraphs for the cover letter, adjusting the “what I can bring to your job” paragraphs—deleting some of them, moving others closer to the top—and shifting the resumé’s “list of accomplishments” to highlight the items most relevant to a given job. After I realized this, I began to feel a lot more confident that applying for a series of jobs isn’t going to kill me.

And really: if I get an offer from next week’s interview and then learn I’m not included in the next set of layoffs, I may take the job anyway—even if it pays less than I’m earning. The recurring workplace flaps, which seem to come more and more often, are ridiculous. I don’t need to put up with this kind of grief. And besides, the prospect of starting something new is beginning to sound pretty good. Darned good!

The Continuing Saga…

1. Unemployment for Christmas?
2. Does any of this have meaning for individuals?
3. Rumors start to fly
4. On the trail of the elusive job
5. Beating the layoff stress
6. How low can I go?
7. Interview No. 1