I failed my first test. It’s probably not a good sign.
As you might know, I face an on-going struggle to find work. Today I’ve been trawling through the usual freelance opportunities hoping to find something I can do remotely. By remotely, I mean working from home, though I guess I also mean something in which I might have some remote competence. Working from home would be my ideal job: able to work longer hours undistracted by office chatter and without a long flu-dosed commute into Liverpool or Manchester. I’d also have my own equipment and software arranged just as I like it and a chair that can handle my lanky frame and doesn’t give me back ache. The thought excited me so much that I was wide awake at six this morning searching for opportunities. I even went so far as to set up an account at one of the bigger freelancing sites.
By 9am I'd already failed the first test they set to see if I’d absorbed all the guff they sent about their company and the freelancing processes. I admit I’m terrible with bureaucracy. My rebellious instincts take over. I’m like this when I’m putting up IKEA shelves: I’d much rather just get on with it and figure it out as I go along than read the instructions. I’m the same with multiple choice questions which appear to insult my intelligence… Well, okay, I probably shouldn’t have clicked on ‘all of the above’ for every answer but I thought I’d spotted a pattern… I guess hubris is another of my more developed skills.
Since I’d failed the test and have to wait days to try again, I made my usual trawl through Gumtree and then, in desperation, turned my attention to Craigslist.
The first thing I discovered is that busty blondes are desperately needed in the Warrington area and they will be paid good money. Sadly, my hair is brown even if my breasts do seem to get bigger with each passing year. Busty? Not yet but one day! Oh, boy! One day!
Putting the disappointment of my breasts to one side (or both sides, given how they lie), I then noticed that a foot model can earn £2000 in Manchester. That’s good money but my hairy feet probably won’t get pass the interview stage and I’m dubious that feet can really earn that much without having to get naked with other feet…
More in my line of work was the ad for a new magazine wanting writers. Intrigued, I followed the link which took me to a Wordpress installation much worse than this one and with all manner of terribly written content produced by desperate people working for nothing. I’d never realised it was so easy to launch a blog and get other poor saps to fill it for you. I might have to call this blog a magazine and me a magazine publisher. Just look at my cigar and zero penny rates for paid content…
The last ad to intrigue me was by one of my fellow job hunters. A Dutch woman in Turkey is looking for work writing English content. She claimed she was ‘near native’ in the language and included this little example of her near native English: ‘I have done editing for different projects, last work I have done was for a Turkish children movie called Hititya.’
Now, I point this out not to demean the woman's skills when she is clearly a gifted linguist. Her four languages far outstrips anything I’ve ever managed and deserve to be put to better use than having to advertise on Craigspace among the breasts and feet. But ‘near native’? In my best Larry David voice: that’s where we have a little little problem…
It’s clearly an interesting world I’m entering, where levels of ability are wildly overstated. Freelancing appears to require confidence, self-belief, and a degree of what we might call 'creative elaboration'. Look on the freelancing websites and you’ll see all the smiling faces of hipster Americans who you know are just great at their jobs. I don’t know how I could compete. They say that people who upload their photo gets five times the work than those without. I doubt if I could even get myself to pose of a photo, let alone upload it, and I think that’s the whole of my problem.
I’m a fanatically hard worker and I like to think a reasonably bright guy with a good sense of humour. But I always fail the professional bullshit test. I couldn’t bullshit or misrepresent myself to save my life. I can never forget that I’m a pale English bloke from the North who sometimes laughs and sometimes frowns. I don’t enjoy snowboarding when I’m not coding PHP. I don’t even consider myself an expert in anything in which I’m supposedly an expert. I have a degree in computing but what does that measure? I taught myself all the HTML I know. The same with CSS, Java, and PHP. I taught myself assembly language as a teenager and was more advanced when I started my woeful degree course than when I finished it. It probably stunted my growth as a programmer by forcing me to learn high level languages which were becoming obsolete as we learnt them. Where are all the Pascal programmers these days?
These days I don’t bother with courses. If I need something doing, I teach myself and figure it out as I’m going along. I don’t have my skillset listed like an Excel table. I’m an organic mess of things I can do well, things I can figure out if I need them doing, and things I’d probably fail at no matter how many times I try. As for my Ph.D, what does it mean? I can talk off the top of my head about eighteenth century poetry? Well, perhaps but I don’t know how long I could talk before I’d start to repeat myself. Some of that knowledge is still there but much of it is lost. So what does the PhD represent? That I was once considered bright enough to do a doctorate? That I was naïve enough to think that it would actually help my chances of finding work? If I lived in London, a doctorate might make a difference. Around here: I’d be better off having my neck tattooed and my bollocks pierced (pardon the French).
The main difficulty I face is that a website asks me: how competent is your written English? I pick the answer 'somewhat'. Somewhat! But that’s because I believe in the old saying that the more I know the more I realise the less I know. It’s probably not the ideal mindset for entering into the business of selling yourself on the internet. Probably not an ideal way to getting a job anywhere except one of those supremely enlightened and creative companies that want unique individuals. I’m always reading about them in papers and they sound great. It's just a shame they only exist like pots of gold at the end of every rainbow and I've not seen a rainbow for months.
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