The Pros and Cons

I love my job. (seriously, click the link)

There are two problems with it. Three if you count parents who think their experience with handling a household is relevant to an entire school district's worth of logistics and/or believe that rules aren't for their kid and/or the other myriad problems that mostly affect the teachers and students and parents, rather than the transportation department. I go into this in more depth in several other stories here on Vocal.

The two main problems, then, are these:

1. We only get paid once a month. This is true for most school personnel, and frankly, it kind of sucks. It makes budgeting difficult, especially when one does not have other adults in the household (my eldest is 20, but she's a student and works minimal hours during her school year. She pays for her own extras now, though) and I'm a widow.
2. My job is technically counted as a substitute position, or sometimes a regular part-time position. It's very ad hoc because the student population we serve is in flux. As an example, I sit here typing this on a Wednesday afternoon rather than being at work because my early afternoon student does not have school on Wednesdays, my middle afternoon student is out for the week, and my late afternoon student is out today. So bang goes at least a couple of hours of pay.

Now here's the thing.

While I do love my job, (and at the moment I can't do more than about six hours a day as I continue recovering from a knee injury), it's only even approaching full-time work for maybe a couple of weeks a year. I think I even had fifteen minutes of overtime a few months ago! And it's also seasonal. This year there seems to be very little opportunity for us lower-in-seniority types to have summer school routes, for instance.

So I have two months - ten weeks - when I am accruing no salary.

Well, just go get summer work, people say, and they're not wrong. Lots of school personnel do just that, though it's not as easy as it sounds. I've done it myself (although in previous years I had more opportunities for summer school routes).

But there's a problem.

Custodial or groundskeeping work at some of our schools? Um, sure, but do you think it's possible that while I'm still recovering from this torn-up knee that I simply am not able to do so? I can barely walk the length of the Transportation parking lot as it is, and that's while using a cane!

Retail? Or fast food? Yeah, companies in general do not hire 54-year-old fat women for short-term summer retail or fast food jobs; those tend to go to the other folks free for the summer: the teenagers.

Well, fall back on your writing then. That can be done remotely!

Yep. That's what I'm doing right now. Like right now, as I type. I appled for a half dozen this morning, in fact. Most companies in this sector don't care that I'm 54 and fat. They might care that I've been summoned for jury duty - Superior Court for my county - in July though. Which is why I need more freelance exposure.

So, we're down to what I've been doing all along, which is freelance writing or proofreading, zero to 40 hours a week depending on the week, either through a company I've gone through before or else truly freelance.

This is all fine, and I have no objections. I enjoy writing, I'm pretty good at it (see?), and if I can get something that will stay with just a few hours a week during the school year and more in the summer, so much the better.

And in the meantime at least I have a new (blog or article) writing sample for prospective clients or employers.