When Battle Plans Go Awry

"No battle plan survives contact with the enemy," said the German strategist, and the recovery plan that I outlined last week collided with reality this week. The 10-hour editing job that I had expected to start right after the first of the year is not even an actual open position yet, and I'm not a shoe-in if it does open up. What's worse, I might have shot myself in the foot when I balked at being on-call 24/7 in addition to the 10 scheduled hours. I don't mind doing some ad hoc night-and-weekend editing within some reasonable parameters, but I can't be available all the time just in case, and I find it hard to believe that anybody else would go along with that, either. It's copy editing. Lives are not at stake here. I would still very much like this gig, but I think my chances died with that exchange.

Well, Eisenhower said that "Plans are nothing; planning is everything," and I'm still doing that. Since I can't go entirely without income I'll have to start bleeding Curio City again until I can figure out something else. I took one last mini-paycheck ($62.55 gross, baby!) for the last week in December. I'm going to skip the other half of the check that would be due on Monday. Then I'm going to start taking 10% of net sales rather than the 15% that I took in December, or the 20% that is my historical due. This will hurt Curio City's debt repayment plan without helping me very much. 

If I can't find at least one copy-editing client within the next month, I'm going to have to find a part-time minimum wage job. Eleven bucks an hour is still a lot more than Curio City can pay me, and I don't mind doing menial mindless work, but I really want to avoid being servile to the public. Most of the menial jobs that haven't been automated yet are customer-facing, and I have already spent too much of my life doing that.  

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I was going to say "At least LY set some easy sales targets for this year," and then I noticed that the second week of 2016 brought in a $750 bird kite sale. Sigh. $750 would be a pretty good total week in January. That one lucky strike will almost surely make this January yet another double-digit loser. Not a cheery start to the new year.

This week, at least, was halfway decent, thanks entirely to Switchables. I still can't believe those are going away. I'm announcing their demise in a newsletter tomorrow morning. It only goes to 185 people, and only some of them will open it, and only some of them are Switchables customers...but some collectors are going to be as shocked and disappointed as I was.