Working in your pyjamas - not simply because you can, but because you've been too busy doing disaster control to change. It's now 3pm, and you're also starving.
Having to update your CV every damn year, sometimes several times, for different clients and different speciality angles (also different formats). You're always surprised when it comes to stating the length of your experience (Have I done this that long? But I still don't know zilch!), but you still cringe over having to make yourself look good.
Outsourcers who fail to grasp the concept of "free" in "freelancer" - they "assign" jobs to you, without failing to ask whether you perhaps might have a job for another client (gods forbid) in the works. Or, only reply to your enthusiastic "Yes I can take this job, give it to me!" email 3 days later, when you've already filled your week with other (much more boring) jobs and have to (yet again) explain the principle of first-come-first-served using very short words.
Slowly but surely getting a stress ulcer from not giving incompetent twats a piece of your mind - yes, because they're people too, and often you get the impression they're also over-worked and over-stressed, but more importantly because you still need them to keep sending job offers your way.
Having to explain, time and again, that yes, my language has a multitude of grammatical cases, and yes, the nouns and adjectives inflect accordingly, and YES, that's why your oh-so-clever QA tool keeps giving me 3k+ false positives from a job with a barely 5k wordcount (not even kidding here, I'm afraid).
Not being able to blame the middle management for work overload - you ARE the middle management (you're also the tech support, accounting and caretaker).
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katajainen) wrote2019-02-27 04:24 pm
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Writing this was actually pretty therapeutic, only now I feel like I'm selling my profession short and need to make a balancing post about all the perks.
Also there's the very, very satisfying feeling I get about a month after a very busy spell; aka when my bank account goes *KA-CHING*no subject
KA-CHING is a very good sound.I mean, a lot of the pet peeves you've described feel like they sort of carry their perks within themselves. Working in your pajamas, the concept of "free," etc... all those could be mechanisms for stress, but also they're pretty nice when things are going well, it seems to me.
I'm always intrigued by the comparison of "work from home" versus working at an office or something, because that lack of division between personal and professional spaces could go either way, I think. I always felt that way when doing homework at school-- on the one hand, I could do it in bed if I wanted to (despite the advice from all and sundry not to), and if I really needed a break I could take one without being beholden to someone else in the office watching what I'm doing. But on the other hand, not having separate spaces meant I always felt a lingering guilt over not working more, even if I'd done the tasks I needed to do. There wasn't the ability to come home and be done.
(I did a lot of working from home a couple weeks ago because my workplace was closed for snow for the better part of two weeks, and I needed the hours. The above are my thoughts on that.)
Also, heh, depends on whom you're explaining it to, but English-speakers at least don't seem to grasp the concept of inflection very well. (And I suppose why would they need to?) *is language snob who thinks that knowing some German confers on her some type of expertise*
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And yes, also about the blurring line between free time and work. As I understand it , it's often an issue these days even for people who don't, technically speaking, work from home - but do reply to work-related phonecalls and emails on their spare time. I consciously try to avoid giving the impression of 24/7 availability (for instance, I very rarely reply to work emails past 7 pm).
Another thing that helps is that I have a room set out for my office at home, so I can close the door (and the kids supposedly know to stay out...) to be "at work", or come downstairs to be "off work". Unfortunately we're going to need that room once the kids are too big to share, so then it's back to the working-from-a-bedroom-corner setup I had back when I started out (I've occassionally considered renting a separate workspace, but apart from the money issue, the idea always feels too much like commuting... perhaps one of those new pop-in sort of places where you pay by the hours used could work? What I really do miss is a some sort of community to work in.)
And the inflection thing... I'm very rarely explaining that (or any other grammar-related thing) to a native speaker of English; this is a very international business, after all. But one thing is constant, though - the person at the other end NEVER knows any Finnish, so it's usually "Our tool found these errors" vs. "They are not errors, your tool is an ill fit for my language".
But I think German is actually a good introduction to inflecting languages, even if on the lighter side (it has like, 4 cases for nouns, while Finnish has 15...) *is a language snob in love with our education system that gave her the chance to learn 3 foreign languages before secondary school* (okay that sounds awfully smug, but it's not really: everyone has compulsory English and Swedish, and I took elective French)