Dog With Two Bones

Welcome back! When we last left our hero, he was in the discomfiting position of having said yes to two overlapping employment options. What happens next gets even wilder. But first let us describe the contestants (using fictional names of course):

First: PhoneMonkey Communications, an old favorite, the company I belonged to for 14 years ending in October of 2008. They're a nimble, friendly little telecommunications software outfit with the knack of shifting habitat and popping up in unexpected States; originally encountered in Tucson during my years there in the '90s, they've since spread and can now be found in Massachusetts, California, Florida, and (coming full circle) Phoenix. When I moved to Seattle in 2000, PhoneMonkey experimented with letting me continue full-time as a telecommuter; the arrangement lasted nine years. (Probably they wanted to claim Washington as another habitat.) Yes, they laid me off in '08, but I can't complain, since in '99 they let me take unpaid leave to finish my novel.

Alas, the novel didn't sell. Not PhoneMonkey's fault.

Second: a local manufacturing company here in Seattle which I'll call Ballard Pterodactyl. They occupy a rambling series of factory floor spaces and dusty fluorescent office niches, upstairs and downstairs along half a block of an old blue-collar street of which they seem the original occupants. Defying the neighborhood gentrification, they persist in their wooden building that dates from the '40s, and inside one can find preserved a vanished Seattle: dim hallways that remind me of the back passages at Pike Place Market, narrow stairways like the ones aboard Puget Sound ferries. Nevertheless, they do a global business with clients in Europe and assemblers in China.

We return to our story. On my cellphone, in the car, I'd said yes to my ex-manager at PhoneMonkey to return for a four-week contract, telecommuting as before, starting on Monday. The car was pulled over to the curb mere yards from the Ballard Pterodactyl building, where I had an interview at 3:00 (and finalizing the PhoneMonkey details with my ex-manager ran the clock to 2:59). I dashed across the street in my jacket and nice shoes, and interviewed from a position of such undesperation that I demanded $5/hr more than I'd be getting from PhoneMonkey--and they agreed to it. The contract would also be for much longer, maybe most of a year. I tend to suck at interviews, but to my vast surprise they seemed all but ready to hand me the job on my way out the door. We agreed on a start date of April 1, and they promised to contact me with their decision soon.

This much you already know.

Now here's the twist: I didn't tell Ballard Pterodactyl that I'd just accepted a contract with PhoneMonkey. (Why spoil a perfectly good interview? They still might not even offer me the job.) HOWEVER, at the interview I dutifully handed over my page of references--on which was listed PhoneMonkey! Indeed, I'd just handed Ballard Pterodactyl the number of the very same ex-manager with whom I'd just finalized the contract.

This literally didn't occur to me all day. I came home in a tizzy of double success, thinking that even IF Ballard Pterodactyl offered me the job it didn't start till April 1, so I MIGHT be able to squeeze both contracts in...and I worried about the East Coast trip...and I had dinner and went to bed...and then in the middle of the night I came bolt awake. Ballard Pterodactyl is going to call my PhoneMonkey manager, I thought, and they're going to LEARN that I've already been hired, and I won't get the offer. What's more, my manager's going to LEARN that I committed to an April 1 contract elsewhere, and I might LOSE the contract I already have.

I've recently been reminded of the parable of the dog with two bones (thanks to the TV show Farscape, which Sara and I have been revisiting on DVD). A dog with a bone looks in the water and sees another dog with another bone. Wanting both bones, he opens his mouth to seize the second one, and plop, the first one falls in and disappears, leaving him, in the words of Ben Browder, looking at himself, with nothing. (5:45 here)

Oops.

So I got up at 4:30 in the morning and sent an email to my guy at Ballard Pterodactyl, saying "You should I know I've been offered a job elsewhere (at PhoneMonkey, in fact, one of my references, ha ha, how ironic!). Of course I'd prefer to work for YOU, but you'll have to let me know soon so I can turn the other company down."

That morning, still in a cold sweat, I tried to reach my ex-manager at PhoneMonkey. I called her home office (she usually telecommutes) and reached her husband, who said, "Oh YOU'RE Matt! Um...you should get in touch with her right away...there's...well, I shouldn't be the one to...you just should contact her real soon."

My cold sweat now positively arctic, I tried every number I had for her, to no avail. Sent her an email--sat there miserably waiting for her call--hours went by--and of course she called just as there was a knock on the front door from some salesman. Thankfully Sara was there to handle that; alive to the situation and her own financial peril, she chased him off with the polite equivalent of a howitzer.

And--my manager wasn't mad! She wasn't canceling the contract, she hadn't talked to Ballard Pterodactyl yet, she still wanted my services. Apparently her clueless husband got me mixed up with some other PhoneMonkey employee. What's more, she had a VOICEMAIL from Ballard Pterodactyl, in which THEY admitted to HER that they were offering me the contract.

So that's how I officially learned that I had two jobs. With reluctance I told my ex-manager (whom I like a lot) that I would have to take the more financially-beneficial offer, and we agreed that my PhoneMonkey contract would be reduced from four weeks to two. She was disappointed too, as they really need another tech writer for the four weeks--and suddenly we both realized we were in a unique situation. She could HAVE my full contract...by giving me a bad reference when she called Ballard Pterodactyl back!

Ulp. There was a long moment of silence on the phone. Then we both laughed. "As if I would do that," she said. "I owe you a steak dinner!" I cried.

Good, friendly PhoneMonkey!

A short while after hanging up with her, Ballard Pterodactyl called and made me the official offer. And so, ladies and gentlemen, SOMEHOW, after just one week of unemployment, I have two contracts lined up, the first one starting Monday, WITH a week off between them where the East Coast trip can theoretically fall. I am--the dog with two bones.

An Editors Meeting

I mentioned that I went to a meeting at Hugo House, back on Monday evening. This was a gathering of a local guild of freelance editors, that I was alerted to by my friend Nina, a member. See, with this layoff has come the desire to change my status a little bit, and explore the world of freelance work, both writing and editing. In part this is due to my panicky jobhunting motto of "try everything quick." Last time I was laid off, it took me four months of sending out resumes and interviewing in my field, the old-fashioned way, before I landed another job. But mostly it's because I WANT to try freelance writing. It's the same urge that has made me start this blog: something about this layoff has made me turn a corner, and suddenly I want to get my REAL WRITING out into public. Somewhere out there are people who make money writing articles about culture and travel and interesting things. I know I can do that.

But freelance writing is also a very scary proposition. And, for an aspiring novelist, it has a bit of a feeling of taking my virginity down to the street corner. In my research I've become aware of a vast, undiscriminating hunger for "content" out there, a kinky shadow-world where "PLR packages" are bought and sold to provide anonymous websites with bite-sized info-chunks on trending hot-topix. Is that the life of a freelance writer? Do I really want to take my talent...there? Do I have to...wear those clothes?

Thus Monday evening found me walking up the familiar wooden porch steps of Hugo House for a meeting of freelance editors. Freelance EDITING, now, that strikes me as a good, safe end of the pool to start with. I can copy-edit with the best of them, and it's somehow more respectable, an activity I can do to my utmost without removing my spiritual bow-tie, so to speak.

Ah, Hugo House. Living in Woodinville I love any excuse to come back into the city, and especially to this weird and venerable Seattle institution. For those who don't know, Hugo House is a self-described "center for the literary arts," a kind of permanent creative writing workshop in a big, creaky, grey-shingled, gabled building on Capitol Hill. It's located on a tiny street with a sports field on one side, a college on another, and a strip of cheap bars on a third--and if there's a better location for a creative writing nexus, I can't envision it. I've taken a few of their writing classes over the years: some have been mind-blowing, others have simply blown, but they've all been friendly and well-attended. Hugo House has its fans and its detractors in Seattle, and the divide basically boils down to this: sometimes, the best thing for an unpublished writer is to be immersed in a welcoming fraternity of like-minded souls; other times, it's the worst thing.

I had no idea, however, that the world had so many freelance editors. I arrived early, due to the demise of my laptop at Tully's, and tried to keep count as the room filled up. By the time it climbed over 30 and they started making a ring of folding chairs around the big table, and standees began peering in from the doorway, I gave up. By far the majority of the editors were women, mostly in their 40s and 50s, wearing sweaters and nice scarves, eyeglasses, and sporting shoulder-length hair in beautiful textures and colors. The few other men, who all arrived late and were relegated to the periphery, were either bearded and silent, or nerdy and chatterboxy.

The topic was Marketing Oneself, which explained the attendance, and I realized this was yet another incoming wave from the economic tsunami. The close, overcrowded room, and the preternatural intensity of focus on the presenters' ideas for generating business, didn't exactly fill me with confidence about the secure life of a freelance editor in today's marketplace. But I diligently took notes, and learned a few things about using LinkedIn and the ethics of posting before-and-after editing samples of clients' work on your website.

In the end, though, the piece of advice they stressed most was simply to "get yourself out there": promote oneself persistently and unabashedly. They joked about how this point needed stressing because editors as a group tended to be shy and introverted, and I realized, heading back down the porch steps into the cool night, that it had been a typical Hugo House class after all.