It’s Friday, and I got nuthin.

Have a great weekend.

A few days ago, I decided I could afford a housekeeper. The math is simple, right? If I work x number of hours at y rate, I’ll be earning more money than if I work x number of hours cleaning my house. Thus I can pay someone to clean my house while I make more money.

Sounded simple, at least.

I decided that all I had to do was to give up daily Americanos or hunker down and do more work on Saturdays.

But here’s the thing: I already gave up the daily Americanos, and I’m already trying to work on Saturday. At this point in my career as a freelance writer, I just don’t have disposable income. I have enough money in the business and personal checking accounts for about a month of expenses, and I have enough in savings for about 3/4 of a month. I have quite a few unpaid invoices on the books, but unpaid invoices won’t pay my rent. There’s no buffer there. And there’s certainly not a stipend in there for a luxury like a housekeeper.

This thought became very clear to me as I worked last week to paint my old apartment. A friend of mine who no longer worries about bouncing checks said, “Beth, just leave it and let the landlord take it out of the deposit.” That sounded like a good idea when I was in “justify a housekeeper” mode. But my deposit is $875. And $875 is a hell of a lot of money. And I spent Saturday, Sunday and Monday trying to make sure I get as much of that $875 back as humanly possible. The picture is me in the final stages of turning a Caribbean Blue kitchen back to Swiss Coffee.

I’m actually having a housekeeping team come by today. I scheduled them before I decided not to use them, and I put aside the money to pay them. (In fact, the day I put the money aside was the day I realized how crazy it was to hire housekeepers. How was I going to come up with the next visit’s money?) I didn’t cancel them for today because this weekend is my open house here at Avenue Z, and I really want everything to shine.  I’m so excited!

Because one of the things I do best is to dwell and obsess about things that have happened, I’ve spent much of today thinking about the teleconference from this morning where a client told me I was no longer needed.

Again, I’m not at all upset about his change in direction, and I’m actually amused (in a non-condescending way).

The layoff was exceptionally well done:

1. The Set Up
   A few days ago, he sent me an email to set up a meeting to discuss [name of newsletter]. He does this every month, but he usually says he wants to discuss the [name of month] [name of newsletter] issue. I found it strange that he said he wanted to discuss [name of newsletter] alone.
2. The Fishing Expedition
   My client and I are regularly chatty, but the beginning of his conversation seemed a little pointed.
   “Hey, Beth. How have things been?”
   “Great. Thanks for asking.”
   “And you’re busy these days? Your business is booming?”
   “It is, actually. I’ve got quite a few projects going right now.”
   [What would he have done if I had answered, "Well, things are quite slow actually. I'm sure glad I have you guys!"]
3. The Jist
   “Listen, Beth. We’ve been thinking of ways to make this process easier, and we’ve decided to go with an educational feed group that can provide content on a regular basis.”
4. The Justification
   “Like you told [name of supervisor], you would have to have a Ph.D. in [name of industry] to be able to write all the relevant content we need. We’re going to go with an industry expert group that can provide us content every month without a learning curve.”
5. The Reassurance
   “Now this doesn’t mean that we’re not going to keep using you. We want you to continue to write the chairperson’s column every month and other articles as necessary. And we’d like to see a proposal for the public relations services.”
6. The Final Ego Stroke
   “I just want you to know that we’ve been really happy with your work, but we have to make this process less complicated.”

That’s all she wrote. He signed off with a friendly “I’ll be in touch soon.” The phone call was record length for us: 8 minutes, 9 seconds.

He was an expert fire-er. I’m applauding.

I just had a teleconference with a long-time client, and my contact told me they were outsourcing my role to an information service and relegating my job to a couple of articles a month. Until now, I’ve been a big player in their newsletter. But the organization of the project was very inefficient, and we were all spending far too much time each month. I spent quite some time talking with them about how they could make the process easier.

But, err. This means I talked myself out of a paying job.

Actually, I’m quite relieved. I wrote a few weeks ago about jobs I work on that have serious flaws. This job was one of them. They were spending thousands a month on the newsletter, and they didn’t have an electronic version that tracked how many people were actually reading it. And a lot of my role was that of glorified secretary. I simply had to organize things and request that people send me their contributions. I did very little writing, and, as I’ve proclaimed before, I am a writer.

Another reason that I’m not worried about the end of this project is that this group was locked in at a very early hourly rate. I wrote about asking them for my standard rate and worrying that they would pass. Since then I’ve been able to increase my rate for incoming groups, but I felt obligated to keep my hourly the same for this client.

So, it’s a very good thing that they’ve reorganized this project, and I know their decision had nothing to do with my contributions. It just made sense. They still want a quote from me to handle their PR and press releases, so I’ll be able to renegotiate my rate.