If I had any doubt about the leaving work thing, the past couple of days really highlighted exactly why I’m no longer at a “day” job. We did our normal weekend yard sale run and yesterday and today I couldn’t even shuffle through the house without the help of a walker. In fact, even with the walker it was pushing things. The right knee is about the size of a healthy watermelon.
You want irony on top of that? While I was ferreting out some of the legal paperwork to move forward with disability and such, I got another job offer. Yes, really. While I was setting up our online store – which was just this side of an afterthought – the site crashed and burned. All my time troubleshooting – well, the friend who got me involved with the site in the first place connected me with the site owner, and we talked about what needed to be done to fix the bugs, the fact that he was being significantly overcharged, and that the website core is vulnerable to hacking (if not already hacked.)
By day two of chatting with him he was talking about creating a position with his company, one which would permit me to work from home. Um… okay?
Reality is that we can’t afford to dismiss income sources at this point, but neither do I want to jump from the frying pan into the fire. I thanked him for the tentative offer and expressed interest, because to do anything else at this juncture would be foolish. And who knows? I might truly enjoy it, if it pans out. Pun unintentional, ha!
G and I also sat down and brainstormed for business details – he’s adamant about doing computer services and copy writing, editing, logo design, and so on. I have nightmares visions of demanding clientele who want everything for pennies. We went through it a few years ago and swore off of web design for that very reason. Between us we do indeed have some pretty specialized skills. The pool of people who can fix a catastrophic hack is one mighty short list. There are automated cleanup services that’ll wipe the malware. Trouble is, they also wipe out the programming along with it. It takes some finesse to fix something that’s torn up your core files and your database.
Finding an appropriate business name is proving a challenge, mainly because finding an available dot-com is a challenge. Pretty much every domain containing the word “business” is taken. There are some for sale for a few tens of thousands of dollars, if we were willing and able to pay that. We’re not.
The store itself was something we’d talked about for a while, but when the new site came up and they offered me a deal I couldn’t refuse, it brought the plan back to the forefront. We made a trip today to get some materials for photography, because until we’ve got some decent photos we can’t post anything for sale.
I want to get some other things going too, sooner or later. Problem is it has to work around my health, which is also a concern for me either with working for someone else or doing our own home-based business. Much as I love him, I do NOT depend on G. We tried that before. I setup a deal that let him do data entry from home – frankly a very simple job, paid a pretty decent amount. He never really “got” the job. He finished everything that was sent his way, but it was done wrong unless I literally went over things line by line. Then G started sending things in without my checking them, because he didn’t want to wait for me to get home. Needless to say, the job didn’t last, and I couldn’t blame the business owner for going silent. He paid G for his hours and that was that.
That sounds like my husband is stupid. He’s not. He’s multi-lingual, has the equivalent of a CPA (though he wouldn’t be licensed to do that here.) He infuriates me at times precisely because I know he isn’t a tenth as helpless as he pretends to be – and other times because he proves he can be as incompetent as the next Neanderthal. He balances it out by some smart moves and by keeping things together that I simply cannot do, but yeesh!
This time around I’ve let him know in no uncertain terms that he has to pull his weight. I’m not giving him any other options, because if he has an out he’ll use it.
Gah – it’s insanely late. I need to call it a night, regardless that I’m not waking at o’dark thirty tomorrow morning. It’s been a long week so far and I don’t see it changing yet.