The Work Thread 2 - Get back to work!

I've applied for a job with the company I was at before, if only to find out which side of the company and who the role would be reporting into.

As Zilly has said, interviews are as much for you as it is for them. Good luck with yours Qikz!!

Had a classic "send to all" mistake email come through to my inbox earlier this morning.

45 minutes later and I'm still getting "STOP REPLYING TO ALL!!!" replies from people who are doing the very thing they want everyone to stop doing. :lol:

It's still going! Well over an hour now and people are still replying all! :lol:

strawberry float OFF!!!

Interview I think went ok, got some questions that I wasn't really expecting but I think I worked through them well.

Role is full time office based so I told the recruiter dude that even if they come back I'm not really looking to work office based as I'm fully remote now so I'll probably turn them down.

Then today my job brings out a message about we want to get people back in the office adhoc, please message me when you'd like to go in over the next 3 weeks. God damnit. I bought up to them I really don't want to go back to the office and want to work fully from home and I'll see what they say.

I think you will really limit yourself Qikz if you are not prepared to go into an office at all.

Most roles whilst now more flexible, will still expect people to come into the office 1 or maybe 2 days a week.

Jenuall wrote:It's still going! Well over an hour now and people are still replying all!

strawberry float OFF!!!

The people who reply all telling everyone not to reply all without a trace of irony are the worst.

Memento Mori wrote:
Jenuall wrote:It's still going! Well over an hour now and people are still replying all!

strawberry float OFF!!!

The people who reply all telling everyone not to reply all without a trace of irony are the worst.

Yep, there's always such a sense of self importance from them as well. As if receiving some emails by mistake is causing the destabilisation of Western society because their job and time is so important that even having to see a popup from an email is enough to distract make all hell break loose

Albear wrote:I think you will really limit yourself Qikz if you are not prepared to go into an office at all.

Most roles whilst now more flexible, will still expect people to come into the office 1 or maybe 2 days a week.

I'm limiting myself, but if I'm happy full time WFH and I can do the work then I'll just keep searching until I find a role.

I'm going to apply to the JET program this winter to see if I can go to Japan next year anyway, so thinking about it maybe searching for a new job now isn't the best idea since I might get accepted. :lol:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58662455

Another wonderful balanced article from the BBC about working from home.

Going to triple post, but got a bit of good news from my current company. They're happy for me to continue working from home indefinately as long as my quality of work doesn't drop and neither do my numbers. Issue with the numbers problem and I mentioned this, the numbers do change year on year based on what clients we have and what happens and sending me in to an office where I'll be less happy won't make my numbers improve they'll get worse. Good news though for a change!

Ugh it's 9hrs 26m tracked on tendering and arranging a job, spent the evening illustrating and "one of the guys wants to see the illustration before we send payment".

The illustration is a £25 component (discounted from £50) of a £560 order and is to be proofed and accepted AFTER payment is made or I will just refund you?

strawberry float off making me work for free, that one guy is probably a knob. Anyway, on with it, I don't think anyone realises just how much UNPAID time is spent engaging with a client before any money changes hands and then you hit the sticking point which boils down something you've surely already demonstrated you have the competence to complete as tendered, there's even a strawberry floating art degree in my signature and a massive portfolio to back it up.

Can you send them something low Res or with a watermark on?

Dual wrote:Can you send them something low Res or with a watermark on?

That's still enough for them to get the general idea for free, and they could always pass that to someone else to work on.

Jenuall wrote:It's still going! Well over an hour now and people are still replying all!

strawberry float OFF!!!

I miss that about working for big multinationals, reply to all storms that would go for a whole day or more were magnificent. An insane insight into how dumb so many people really are but magnificent all the same.

Victor Mildew wrote:
Dual wrote:Can you send them something low Res or with a watermark on?

That's still enough for them to get the general idea for free, and they could always pass that to someone else to work on.

Yeah. I had that with unpaid typography and logotype design work. Creative direction is worth more than the drawing itself in some cases. That's just the product.

The service itself is time. Time I don't have a lot of at the moment as I'm tendering 6 projects which is a lot for one person.

I'm doing two watermarked proofs for them today and asked them to send the the artwork fee over as a split payment via bacs.

I know builders work on net 30 days but it's just impossible in this sector.

The importance of charging artwork and release fees is essentially to do with rights. Anyone can waltz off with days worth of drawing, drafting and digital work and have someone else redraw it or remove the watermark on fiver or whatever. People learn quickly in this industry, never hand over work product without a legally binding agreement.

Payment terms simply means you have no debt delinquency which is how most small businesses fold as they then cannot pay their creditors or overheads.

Also I just bought a graphics tablet screen yesterday (sale ended at midnight) as I was told invoice would be paid today, knowing I was going down the draft/revise route on something. Thankfully I'm good for it but that's not always the case.

strawberry float me I don't miss that crap from freelancing. Have someone endlessly going back and forth with you, knowing full well what you're capable of but trying to get you to prove yourself to them, as if you even need to. Then when it comes to billing, despite being totally up front with them, they go "oh that's more than I was expecting", even though you've not even billed for all the time wasted with them bothering you.

They've offered me 50% terms which I'll accept for most reputable businesses or Ltds but I won't be ordering hundreds of pounds worth of polo shirts or transfers until next week so tbh they're only slowing things down.

10hr 14m tracked on admin alone, cool.

Worst case scenario although I really hope this won't happen, the cardholder goes to the bank and issues a chargeback over something petty (never happened to me but still), this then flags me up with my card payment processor as a "high risk" business and they can revoke the entire account.

There's all kinds of nightmares you can face in this line of work.

I had a neat idea though, send a photo of myself and drawing tablet and sketches I have propped up, at a slight angle, so that it's specacularly low resolution but obvious evidence of the route I'm going down.

Send even a low res PNG and they can take something to Fiverr and get it redrawn 1:1 in 24hr hours and that's you strawberry floated.

Again unlikely given the lengths I go to vet every single one of my clients now but for those less experienced it's a common way to defraud visual artists and designers, especially "freelancers" (I'm not a freelancer, I'm a consultant / applied art contractor with a strawberry floating job and a business I've built for over 7 years at that. I started this when I was 16!).

Back today after 2 weeks on leave.
I hate life today.

So since returning back to the office I’ve managed to negotiate down to 1 day in the office and 4 at home. I run our biggest account in Europe (Amazon) and basically said I prefer to sit in my man-cave, headphones in, on my own and get on with work rather than sit in the open plan office where it’s stupidly noisy.

Boss didn’t 100% agree but said we’d see how we go…. Well I’m doing my 1 day in the office today and I’ve had to listen to the Marketing team waffle on about rats, mice, badgers and strawberry floating hedgehogs for 45mins without them doing a single bit of work. :fp:

Safe to say I’ve proved my point that working from home is a million times better than sitting in the office just because.

I'm getting away with 2 days per month in the office.

Combine that with my flexed hours 4 day weeks and I am one jammy dickhead.

The Work Thread 2 - Get back to work!

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