We left our hero Katherine in a state of shock. She had been wrestling with the conundrum of whether she should become self employed or not, when she got a call which pretty much told her that she was self employed, as she’d had her proposal accepted.
For months Katherine has been worrying about money, economising and worrying some more. This piece of work would pay her bills for another 3 months, and it would only take her a few days to complete.
What if she got more work like this? What if…her head swam in a pleasant fantasy of regular, well paid work, doing interesting things for large chunks of cash. But everyone says this working for yourself business is a nightmare. She was back to worrying again.
So she went to the pub. She was looking forward to a pint of ale, a strong dark ale, to celebrate her first project. She meets her friend Mark in the pub. Mark is a journalist, and buys her a celebration drink. Which is good, because she’s left the house with only £1.53 in her purse. Several hours later, she stumbles out of the pub, having remembered that the Craft Beer place takes cards. She rolls home, feeds the cats, and goes to bed.
The next morning, Katherine is a mess. She can’t remember much of last night, but there are vague recollections about boasting about getting her proposal accepted, arguing with some guy at the bar about whether Facebook was a useful tool for B2B promotion, and drinking a lot of strong dark ale. She feels terrible. And she has a nagging feeling that she was supposed to do something important today. She sits up in bed, which makes her feel faint and sick at the same time. Today was supposed to be the start of my new life. The start of self employment. The new project. Oh, shit.
She grabs her phone, and sure enough, there’s an email from Oliver, Julia’s client, wondering if she can do a Skype call at 11.30. She checks the time. It’s 10.42. By 11.30 Katherine is showered, dressed, has fed the cats, and thrown up twice. She has put the cat’s food out on the balcony as the stink threatens to make her sick again. She can still smell it though, or is that her? Is it the smell of fear? Oh, well. You can’t smell people over skype, she mutters.
She arranges her laptop so Oliver will just see a blank wall, not the debris of where she fell asleep on the sofa last night. And she presses the button. An hour later, somehow, she’s made it through the meeting. She has some notes, and she thinks she got away with it. She goes back to bed.
Tomorrow’s episode. It’s all happening fast for Katherine, and we can see that she doesn’t really know what she’s doing. Did you stumble into self employment, or did you have a grand plan with key milestones from the beginning? Have you ever called a client when you’re still drunk from the night before?
