4455: Better Things
Oh hey it's been a while.
The first order of business is that I'm OFFICIALLY done working for temp agencies. Like, forEVAR. I'm determined to make this work for as long as it makes my resumé workable, vs. effectively paying 50% of my potential earnings to get whatever crap job comes up.
Of course, I was bound and determined to make Caketown work, too, but... I dunno, space was against me? [as in, the physical volume things take up, not "the final frontier"] I tend to see the silver lining anyway, since working at Trackertown* does mean a little more actual mileage but less driving at non-optimal MPG speeds ["idling gets you nowhere", sexy 2008 Mustang stalling out front of Party City for like 25 minutes before finally deciding to PARK], though I get the impression at times that my HR experience is even less transferrable than my A/P experience at Caketown =/ [which is to say that it feels a bit High School at times, though I'm not turning my nose up at a stable job--provided it DOES stabilize [if it doesn't, I guess I'm screwed [oops]]]
*best I can determine from talk and "all-hands" meetings is we specialize in tracking shit, to various degrees of importance greater than "where is the nearest starbucks"
The nitty-gritty goes something likeFalco: Hey, Julie's awesome! We wanna contract her directly! Coo?
Agency: aw HELL NO whut
Falco: Adebuh?
Agency: You can't pull that shit, it's in the contract!
Falco: *reads* Hey, Contract Dude, this contract say we can't do that?
Contract Dude: Uh... nope.
Falco: Hear that, Agency? You fulla shit!
Agency: Oh wait, I totally meant you can do that, yeah... yeah! Congrats, Julie!!1
Me: Adebuh?
but the short of it is Trackertown will pay me a little more than they paid the agency, which is like a 200% raise D=
...no, wait, slightly less than 200% raise BEFORE taxes... after... who knows, 'cause they aren't withholding anything, if prior contractual jobs are any indication ¬_¬
But that's fine--I'm not opposed to putting, say, 25% of each paycheck that comes in directly into savings and continuing to live basically as miserly as before [but with tactical splurges]. The trick for 2013 and beyond will be, is the raise enough to fund a thing I want to do? Or will I have to save [and negotiate further raises] for a little longer before said thing is feasible?
The obvious trick will be to figure out how to do the thing for little/no cost, but the obvious solutions aren't really good from my current standpoint. If I could do it all myself, that would negate the idea I had in the first place [contracting it out], and if I get someone to work for cheap, that's completely counter to my [and the entire online artist/web comic community's] anti-starving-artist notions, not to mention a gross insult.
Mind, I'm still recouping from "I was sick for a month and did nothing else but work [when it felt unavoidable], sleep, and consume soup and lozenges," so it's POSSIBLE I could get back in the groove and not need a contractor. Evidence suggests otherwise BUT I will give it a shot before falling back to Plan B. Certainly would be simpler if I could do everything myself, natch =p but life seems to demonstrate that this just isn't possible. Every time I try to cut some extraneous Thing out of my life to free up time to do this project, that time immediately gets filled with something else... -_-
Giftmas was good, I guess--I still feel lonely when I'm home and C isn't [particularly if I'm home by myself--that often turns into naptime], which has deteriorated any chance of my getting anything done on Sundays because I just end up not caring about anything. I don't know what it is about being alone that removes all the discipline I had built up for myself over the year+ I was dedicated to daily art, but it feels like so much, "Yay, I can sleep on the couch without having to have earplugs in" =p [the couch+narcolepsy fetish is difficult to explain, beyond that I don't allow myself to get my actual bed "dirty" from my unwashed, went-outside-today body]
I guess I'll cut it off here to keep to the subject line [gripes to follow as appropriate, though remind me about the ink cartridge if that sounds like it interests you], but boy, do fun times abound when telling people about Dan's roasting a duck and smoking two things of ribs and a rabbit [the last an impulse buy on a parsnip errand].
The first order of business is that I'm OFFICIALLY done working for temp agencies. Like, forEVAR. I'm determined to make this work for as long as it makes my resumé workable, vs. effectively paying 50% of my potential earnings to get whatever crap job comes up.
Of course, I was bound and determined to make Caketown work, too, but... I dunno, space was against me? [as in, the physical volume things take up, not "the final frontier"] I tend to see the silver lining anyway, since working at Trackertown* does mean a little more actual mileage but less driving at non-optimal MPG speeds ["idling gets you nowhere", sexy 2008 Mustang stalling out front of Party City for like 25 minutes before finally deciding to PARK], though I get the impression at times that my HR experience is even less transferrable than my A/P experience at Caketown =/ [which is to say that it feels a bit High School at times, though I'm not turning my nose up at a stable job--provided it DOES stabilize [if it doesn't, I guess I'm screwed [oops]]]
*best I can determine from talk and "all-hands" meetings is we specialize in tracking shit, to various degrees of importance greater than "where is the nearest starbucks"
The nitty-gritty goes something likeFalco: Hey, Julie's awesome! We wanna contract her directly! Coo?
Agency: aw HELL NO whut
Falco: Adebuh?
Agency: You can't pull that shit, it's in the contract!
Falco: *reads* Hey, Contract Dude, this contract say we can't do that?
Contract Dude: Uh... nope.
Falco: Hear that, Agency? You fulla shit!
Agency: Oh wait, I totally meant you can do that, yeah... yeah! Congrats, Julie!!1
Me: Adebuh?
but the short of it is Trackertown will pay me a little more than they paid the agency, which is like a 200% raise D=
...no, wait, slightly less than 200% raise BEFORE taxes... after... who knows, 'cause they aren't withholding anything, if prior contractual jobs are any indication ¬_¬
But that's fine--I'm not opposed to putting, say, 25% of each paycheck that comes in directly into savings and continuing to live basically as miserly as before [but with tactical splurges]. The trick for 2013 and beyond will be, is the raise enough to fund a thing I want to do? Or will I have to save [and negotiate further raises] for a little longer before said thing is feasible?
The obvious trick will be to figure out how to do the thing for little/no cost, but the obvious solutions aren't really good from my current standpoint. If I could do it all myself, that would negate the idea I had in the first place [contracting it out], and if I get someone to work for cheap, that's completely counter to my [and the entire online artist/web comic community's] anti-starving-artist notions, not to mention a gross insult.
Mind, I'm still recouping from "I was sick for a month and did nothing else but work [when it felt unavoidable], sleep, and consume soup and lozenges," so it's POSSIBLE I could get back in the groove and not need a contractor. Evidence suggests otherwise BUT I will give it a shot before falling back to Plan B. Certainly would be simpler if I could do everything myself, natch =p but life seems to demonstrate that this just isn't possible. Every time I try to cut some extraneous Thing out of my life to free up time to do this project, that time immediately gets filled with something else... -_-
Giftmas was good, I guess--I still feel lonely when I'm home and C isn't [particularly if I'm home by myself--that often turns into naptime], which has deteriorated any chance of my getting anything done on Sundays because I just end up not caring about anything. I don't know what it is about being alone that removes all the discipline I had built up for myself over the year+ I was dedicated to daily art, but it feels like so much, "Yay, I can sleep on the couch without having to have earplugs in" =p [the couch+narcolepsy fetish is difficult to explain, beyond that I don't allow myself to get my actual bed "dirty" from my unwashed, went-outside-today body]
I guess I'll cut it off here to keep to the subject line [gripes to follow as appropriate, though remind me about the ink cartridge if that sounds like it interests you], but boy, do fun times abound when telling people about Dan's roasting a duck and smoking two things of ribs and a rabbit [the last an impulse buy on a parsnip errand].