Nathan Nelson is a carbon-based life form, web geek and International Studies student based in the UK.Don’t come here for careers advice
// January 21st, 2009 // 2 Comments » // diary
I’m currently a permie. That doesn’t mean I’m a member of some weird gang that really likes thermally treated hair, it means I work on a permanent contract. Permie is a common word for this, which makes it all sound a bit Tom Brown’s Schooldays – “That rotter Jerome is a permie, he’ll take hot crumpet from behind without blubbing in the photocopier room, but only if you don’t ruffle his curls”.
After getting back from Cambodia I was in desperate need of a job, a permanent job was on the table, and if your wallet is populated by mystery lint and it takes time you don’t have to build up clients again or find a contract, you’ll take it. I couldn’t sit on my arse waiting for the Perfect Job, and I still don’t even know what my Perfect Job is because, very rudely I think, no one has called me up to offer it to me. I do know it involves at least few months a year abroad, a fedora hat, a woman with a great sense of humour and a brain the size of a planet, a mongrel dog called Frank, a book deal, cows, a popular occasional show on Radio 2, and a toilet that has been wallpapered with old maps. But I don’t want to go into specifics. Arf arf.
This is my first time back being a salaried employee since 2001, and I’m still not used to it. I quit being a permie first time round and started working for myself because no-one else would give me the job I wanted. It turns out I shouldn’t have given myself the job either because I wasn’t very good at it, but it taught me some valuable lessons which enabled me to take up contract IT work in London. Fast forward to now, I’m more restless than I’ve ever been, and occasionally behaving like a pain-in-the-arse teenager when I probably should be knuckling down.
I’ve already blogged about the frustrations of office work. Not all offices are alike, but most are. Not everyone works for Google and gets to sit around on beanbags getting massages and playing air hockey while supping on smoothies. Most offices are bad places to work. Open plan, characterless warehouses of tube-lit crapness, crushing to the soul and sapping of all creative urges. A pox on them all. Some day we will all work from home, actually be part of the community we live in, and wander why pissed so much time up the wall standing in overcrowded trains and buying rubbish coffee.
So you’d think with this experience of different workplaces and ways of working that I’d have some useful insights. No. Sorry. Stop here if you were expecting anything that useful.
I’ve been spending a lot of time on Twitter. The combination of micro-blogging, communication and exchange of help and ideas in such a simple format (140 characters of text or less) really is addictive. There is everything from help and useful links to getting a minor rant about something off your chest, to reassuring words, to increasingly noisy conversations that have had me laughing like an idiot in the silence of my own living room, to following some really interesting and funny people.
I’m in contact with several people on Twitter who work for themselves, from their homes – insomniac shed workers, developers, writers and other types, and though I know damn well that it is not easy to work for yourself through experience, I’ve been missing it. One Twitter contact remarked yesterday about issues with a client involving their request for changes, and money being owed. He reminded me about one of the situations that made me despair of working for myself and wish I was back in a permanent job where you got paid at the end of the month regardless, and in turn I ended up writing this.
Not long after starting out by myself I got a job designing a website for a restaurateur, through a guy who had been to the same school as me and was introduced by one of my old teachers as someone I could well do work with as he ran a hosting business. We got along fine, and I went with him to the restaurant, all curved lines and fancy bar stools, to meet the owner. We discussed what he wanted, and I took away a menu to use as the basis of a colour scheme. It was sort of fauny-brown. A short while later I had put a Flash animated site introduction together (forgive me, these things were all the rage at the time) – jazzy music, sweeping shots of the fancy bar stools and curvy lines, pornographic closeups of the food. Then, as there was no more info to put up, a holding page with opening times.
I never even got any further than that. I called him up to tell him about the site, he looked at it – “The colour’s wrong”.
“OK,” I said, “well I’ve been matching it by eye to the menu so it might be a bit off but I’ll have another go”. I scanned the menu this time, sampled the colour with the eyedropper tool, and used that to create the background colour of the site. I emailed him to tell him about the latest version.
The colour’s still wrong came the reply. So I tried another. Still wrong. And again. Still wrong, it’s not the same colour as the menu.
Finally, I got the name of his printers, called them up and got the Pantone reference of the menu colour.
Still wrong. At this point, having checked on two of my monitors, I came to the conclusion that either he was colour blind or he was looking at the site on an Etch-a-Sketch. This had been dragging on for ages, so I asked for half the quoted amount in payment as I was already writing myself credit card cheques just to eat.
At this point, I found out that my erstwhile business partner, the guy with the hosting business, had been going into the restaurant, eating and drinking to his heart’s content, and putting it on a tab that was coming off what I was supposed to be getting paid.
I wrote two letters – one to tell the restaurateur I couldn’t do anything else for him, and the other to the erstwhile business partner to say that I wasn’t interested in us doing business any more. All perfectly civil, but honest and straightforward. I screwed my chances of getting paid anything else for the job, screwed my chances of getting any more work through the partner, and walked away breathing a sigh of relief for not being involved with either of them any more. Working for a company you may be required to play nice with a client who mucks you around, but if you’re working for yourself and waiting for money so you can eat, crap clients are worse than no clients at all, and crap business partners are the same.
That was a nightmare, and yet a year or so later I was introduced to a completely random copywriter in Leeds by a Yellow Pages telesales woman who thought we’d get along having spoken to us separately, ended up starting a company with him and his father, and we’re still friends years later. Them’s the breaks.
So in conclusion, I am still hoping to find the Perfect Job or even something close, no work is ever easy but I preferred the hours when I worked for myself (nocturnal), and the restaurateur’s website still isn’t the same colour as his pissing menu.
Here endeth the sermon. I told you, don’t come here for careers advice. I haven’t figured it out yet.
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