an ocean and a rock away

It’s kind of amazing how many times a week someone tries to talk down my (really reasonable, industry standard, not significantly higher than minimum wage in my country) rate by saying something like, “I’m on a budget here,” or “I can get this work done for 1/3 the price if I send it to [third world country].”

My reply is usually, “I, too, have a budget,” or, “Be my guest.”

Honestly, I think sometimes that the hardest thing to learn about freelancing is that you don’t have to suffer so someone else can gain. Do what I do - smile and then happily send THOSE clients to your competition.

Between some medical leave and the death of my sister, I haven’t worked in a while, so I recently decided to start taking on some little transcription projects for a bit of extra cash. I used to do social media management for a living but I’m totally burnt out on it, finding that most of the time, people just want you to polish a turd for them and that it’s not in my nature to deceive people for money. Every time someone wants me to run a Facebook campaign for them, all I can think about 90% of the time is Stewie Griffin and the CashScam guy. “What you do is you pick up the phone and you sell, sell, sell.”

So, the major appeal of transcription work was that it’s not subjective and nobody will bother me with strategic planning meetings or really vague requests like, “make us more popular.” (At worst, they just lie about how many speakers you will be dealing with and the quality of their recording.) I also like that it’s flexible and I can work on it at 3am, and that it’s mine, so that when I find a client that’s being unreasonable, I can happily pass them along to my competition without needing to convince my boss it’s a waste of time. 

I had meant to do it only about 20 hours a week, but it turns out I’m good at it, and all of my clients keep coming back for more work. When I left for Wales last week, I left myself 3 hours of work. I returned to find 63 hours waiting for me. I know not to ever complain about a feast when freelancers often know famine, but dang. Similarly, I caught up yesterday and had a day off, and today, I’ve already booked in 30 hours of work. 

I’m mostly just sitting here, drinking tea and thinking how weird it is that I’m doing this full-time now, when 6 weeks ago, I wasn’t even sure I was good at it. It’ll never be lucrative - there is too much global competition and who knows what voice recognition, which is still too unreliable to really matter right now, will do to the industry as a whole as the tech improves.

I am really enjoying it, though. It’s actually a lot of fun to listen in on people’s user feedback interviews, their dissertation interviews, their marketing webinars, software tutorials, etc. I’m making some pretty interesting contacts in a range of business and academic positions, which can’t hurt, either. 

Interestingly enough, I’m finding the transcription work to be a lot better all around than Virtual Assistant work. Generally, when I see people looking for a VA, they have basically decided that they are too cheap to pay their secretary a living wage and instead want to replace her for $2USD an hour. They don’t really want an assistant - they want a butt-kissing slave that makes them feel important. Caveat emptor.