This is the new yard spider. Can you see him at dead center. I can't. Or maybe it is a she-spider. On to business. Everybody thinks competition is good, how the market place is the great playing field that ensures the highest quality for the lowest price. But anybody who’s bought much in the past decade knows this just is not so. That playing field is not level, the referees are corrupt and the goalposts have moved. With that attitude, I began to publish on FireHow.com today.
I signed up for PayPal, yes, I now take Visa, and went to work grinding out a few computer articles. They’re not great, but they are hands down better than the competition. This is my first foray into the on-line writing gig and I am leery of all claims. Competition “on the job” quickly degenerates into currying favor with the boss after the first person is seen to get away with it. For now, nobody knows who the boss even is. Will quality alone be enough to get myself some readership?This is a big question, since I have no other potential source of income for now. I am still breathless from last week, still unable to even contemplate doing anything but write. But that is better than doing nothing right now. Just me and the cat, or actually it is cats, they seem to be sniffing each other out. Wallace had a friend who shot up to 300 pounds when he worked a computer. He lost it by switching to construction. I wish I could, medically. Economically, Time says there are 34.8 construction workers for each job out there. Ouch.
I am taking until noon to get started despite up to 11 hours of sleep every night. No more jumping out of the sack like I used to. The cat sleeps more than I do, and in stranger positions and locations. Sometimes I wake up on my side with Pudding-Tat stretched out balanced on my hip. One day, I’ll video that cat and send it in. I think my lethargy is from my new prescriptions. My head can tell if any of them contain any nitroglycerine at all. (It gives me a hangover.)
My guitar player has disappeared. This is Hi, the singer who only knows a few chords. I did send him the big email, the one I always use to weed out the uncommitted. I doubt that swayed Hi in any way, but since then he has not been around. A few people say he hangs out at Capt. J’s, but I dislike the weekday server in there so I won’t go in.
That server is a bad example, she serves but it is too obvious she only wants the money. If you don’t tip a dollar every drink, she will ignore you until you finally have to “interrupt” her to get her attention. Then she behaves like she’s stopped doing important things to serve you, and you owe her. It is really bad, so I don’t go in because even if I have a drink, it takes me an hour to finish it.
Which reminds me, a new place has opened where the Blarney Stone went under a few months back. Corner of Washington and Dixie. Laura the Karaoke lady has been texting me to drop in. I did. The owner is somebody I recognize but cannot place. He’s a patron of some other bar and finally bought his own, calling it Denny’s or something like that. All the customers know me, so there is some potential for playing there.
Now of course not having steady income always causes me to begin looking at options, often bringing back-burner plans back into focus. While it is impossible to quote all my sources, one thing I watch is the success rate of small business. I am convinced the average “new” business startup these days costs around $215,000 and most of it is still borrowed. Yet without that kind of money, too many startups are not lasting even one year.
At this point, my observations differ from the pundits (I finally get to use that word again). One of their criteria is the “hiring rate” after 12 months, where I rate success on how few people you have to hire, that is, having to hire help means you planned things badly. Also, the statistics tend to ignore the static shop, the small business such as mine, which “keeps the wolf away from the door”. My shop was never intended to make me rich, and although it never paid as much as a job, the hours and working conditions are unquestionably excellent.
The reporters and magazines laud the shops that constantly expand out and franchise, but I find those operations to be the exceptions. When I look around, I see thousands of shops where the owners have no plans to “go global”, yet many of them have managed to stay open for years. I’m again looking at what can be done with the existing floor space I already have. So far, no brainstorms.
[Author's note 2015-03-24: this post leaves a lot of loose ends. The guitarist wound up in jail, the new pub is called "Buddy's" and I learned to sing there by always going on after the worst people in the house so I'd sound better. Hey, it worked for a lot of people I grew up with. The server was canned shortly thereafter. The cash startup fee mentioned ($215,000) is pure coincidence with my observation five years later this had fallen to $15,000. I did not stay with PayPal or Visa due to their repressive and intrusive policies, mentioned here years before similar complaints became common, I might add.
And writing for dollars? Nope, that was a non-starter. It is more like writing for fractions of a penny. The only way make money at it is to pump out tons of garbage and plaster the Internet with sub-quality shlock that floats to the top of the search engines. The on-line writing trade is designed so that vast quantities of garbage pays more money than writing short, quality articles.[
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