I am beginning to worry about this potential employer of mine.
For one thing, they are making me jump through a LOT of hoops. I have to do so many steps just to maybe qualify for future jobs. It’s beginning to feel artificial. Like the real point is to see how much abuse I will take.
Their desired answer : lots.
Plus they keep emphasizing what good exposure the gig will be, and how useful for getting future jobs it will be, and talking about what a great way to start a career as a writer it is, and so forth and so on.
I associate that kind of talk with people looking to exploit wannabe writers, myself.
Finally, after all this hoop jumping, they are weirdly vague about what exactly it is they want me to write.
On the personal misgivings side, they want me to list what games or other geeky things I am “expert” at.
Not super comfortable with declaring myself an expert in anything. I’m not a specialist, I’m a generalist. I know little bits about a lot of things. Experts know a whole lot about a single thing. It’s totally different.
They also want me to use words like “professional” and “experienced” in my bio.
I am neither. I’m just some highly articulate weirdo on the internet. dammit.
None of this adds up to an actual objection to the job. So I am going to go ahead and do the rest of their hoop jumping BS.
I am probably just getting nervous because it’s all so real now. I have to keep fighting off the urge to just ghost them in favour of a very manly “run away and hide till it goes away” kind of strategy.
But I will NOT start my re-entry into the world of freelancing with an entirely avoidable failure. I will see this shit through no matter what, and they will either like my writing enough to keep me on or not.
Having a regular gig, even as a barely paid stringer for a shady website, would help me pull my life together by giving me something meaningful to structure it around.
Right now, this blog is my main structural element. And it helps a lot, and I love each and every one of you for that.
But I need more. And UpWork is my ticket out of this dump of a life of mine. It offers me the best chance to jump the gap between me and the socially functional world of working for a living because it’s remote work I know I can do.
So I don’t have to interview for it in person and I can take writing a proposal on UpWork and when the job comes, I can kick its ass with my awe inspiring skills.
Well, they inspire awe in ME, anyhow.
I’ve spent far too long cowering in the shadows. Time for me to burst onto the scene in all my iridescent effervescent incandescent glory and wow this world right out of its collective fuzzy socks.
Because I’m fucking amazing.
More after the break.
Yet more misadventures in ordering in
Good god, y’all.
This time, the freaking delivery person not only left my order outside our apartment building, they did not even ring up to tell us it was there.
Lord knows how long I might have waited for the phone to ring if I wasn’t an inherently paranoid and suspicious person who sense that his order was overdue and exiting his game to check up on it.
See, this is why I have trust issues. This kind of thing justifies being such a paranoid and suspicious person because people are constantly fucking up the simplest of things around me and I have to watch out for myself all the fucking time.
I can never just trust people to do their jobs competently. I always have to be on the lookout for someone having their fuckhead moment of the day and screwing up.
This is how micromanaging happens, people. People like me experience enough idiocy that they conclude that all their employees are drooling morons who can only do things right when they are being treated like dogs in obedience school.
I know better than that, of course. People are not inherently stupid. Society would not function if everyone was an idiot but me.
BUT bad management can bring out the stupid in everyone because if the employees are afraid of you, you will provoke an anxious adrenaline response in them, and adrenaline makes people stupid.
Ya know, that revelation alone could revolutionize management as we know it.
It would teach a lot of the angry type managers what they are doing wrong.
Take it from someone who grew up around an angry type dad and who therefore spent a lot of time thinking about the whole cycle.
Of course, I know exactly why my food got left outside the god damned building. In fact,. I can see it in my mind like I had security cam footage. It’s that clear.
Yet another courier was defeated by the mind breaking challenge of figuring out how to pick up the phone attached to the building and dial 0601.
Those types of buzzer systems have been around for more than 25 years and yet person after person is utterly baffled by them.
How someone can be old enough to drive and yet never having dealt with this kind of setup is beyond me.
Victims of suburban life, I suppose.
I wonder how they would handle the old fashioned system where there is a whole panel of individual buttons for individual apartments, with people’s names next to them.
Presumably they would take one look at that and run shrieking into night.
Gotta love the apes using the same techniques white police used to use on black people way back then.
I see what you did there. movie! Clever.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.