Twenty Years Of Schoolin' & They Put You On The Day Shift

For those of us keeping track, today marks my 18th straight day of work since the ill-fated Hotel W. experiment -- a modern freelance record for me. I'm due back at LT. this coming Monday & Tuesday, so I'm guaranteed to have at least 20 days running. Then we play it by ear; maybe they won't need me Wednesday, for instance, but will ask me to come back on Thursday & Friday. But it's good that I'm basically the proofreader du jour, if not du whatever the French word for week is. Plus, as my regular readers will know, this week was significant in that I got Select back in the rotation. I am well nigh loved & respected there, getting along famously with all the kids. I got skills to pay the bills.

I'm not as superstitious as I used to be, life has beaten that out of me, so I must say that this L.T. gig is the least stressful $$$ I ever made. I'm used to proofreading or editing pages & pages of text copy under tight deadlines, so naturally this is going to seem easy by comparison. For instance, I was here 4 hours on Tuesday without a scintilla of work coming my way. Yesterday I had perhaps 15 minutes of total work out of 5 1/2 hours. Which means you really have to focus and concentrate when the work does come in. It's almost like my own personal internet cafe, but instead of me paying a buck for every 15 minutes, I am instead paid to sit here while I surf the proverbial net until I'm needed. But M. said he wants someone here ready in case something comes along. Usually it's a poster or advertisement for an upcoming show that I look at & then sign off on. I see it as a win-win situation for everyone involved. They get my unparalleled expertise in all matters proofreading, almost like I'm a proofing consultant; I get the benefit of their quite reasonable financial remuneration. Of course, they don't have to pay me benefits or the like. It seems like they laid off a lot of people in recent times, and it's a big TV network, so they're still way ahead if you look at like that. In fact, the network just paid the staggering sum of $500,000 per episode for the rights to broadcast a hit show that ABC owns.

Now, the reality is that it could all end at any time. But that is life itself in a nutshell: no guarantees all around. Anything can end at any time: a job, a relationship, a loved one. It's best to take it a day at a time while looking slightly ahead and keeping a positive outlook, like a mutant cross between Norman Vincent Peale and Jean-Paul Sartre.