Ten Bucks Is Ten Bucks
“Well, what do you think?” The Passer says as we reach the end of another slow day. “Do you think it’s going to get any better?”
“No.” I say and shrug. “I think all of us would be doing something else, if there was anything else to do.”
The New Company wants all of us to do Shoot-N-Show, but most of us die hards from the Old Company don’t want to do Shoot-N-Show. I’ve worked with a few employees of the New Company and they are shocked beyond words that I’m refusing to do what the Home Office wants me to do. The general feeling of everyone from the Old Company can be summed up in one sentiment-What are they gonna do? Fire me?
This is the busy time of year, but it’s not busy for me and a few of the other Old Company curmudgeons I’ve talked to. As always, there are Good Shoots and Bad Shoots and I’m getting nothing but the Bad Shoots. Might have something to do with my bad attitude.
At least I’m working. There are a few of the Old Company old timers who were trained on the New Company systems and then never given any work. Like all Assembly Line Portrait Company, the New Company is loath to fire anyone-they just never work you until you finally wake up one day and discover you need to get a job. So, hey, it could be worse.
I’ve been working away from home for a couple of weeks. The New Company has slightly different rules for how far you have to travel to get a room and how much they pay for mileage and all that good stuff. I’m back to getting a per diem and occasionally staying in the cheapest no name motels I can find. But I find that I’m not as tough as I once was and I like little things like hot water, more than six TV channels, and the free breakfast-even if it’s just milk and cereal.
In the good old days of a couple of years ago, I carried the portable portrait studio around and the Passers carried the portable sales station around. This was a perfect system and I didn’t need to worry about what supplies the Passer needed and I didn’t have to wait around for thirty minutes while they take their own sweet time in breaking down their equipment. Now I have to carry all the crap and order supplies and listen to each Passer bitch and moan about how the last Passer didn’t pack very well and so on and so forth. But worst of all is the fact that I have twice as much junk and I absolutely hate cramming it all into my van.
I pretty much hate using it as well. The New Company Studio is total shit from the ground up, pure and simple button pusher gear that anyone can use to create boring and unappealing portraits.
Well, I’m sitting here grinding my teeth as I think about it. I didn’t set out to be so bitchy today. I just wanted to add a new post that talked about the general state of the New Company and how things are going. They are not going well.
So I’m working on a few other things, but being out of town in fairly dull and uninteresting places means I am not taking a lot of fine art images and I can’t work on my Table Top Photography while I am away from my tabletop. I don’t have enough time to work on my websites-it’s shocking how long it takes me to bang out one of these posts. It’s also a never ending process to settle on a WordPress theme and get new content into place and then go about the business of tweaking the SEO so someone might actually stumble across it while doing a Google search. All of this stuff takes time and effort.
So while I am at work I can work on a bit of writing and a bit of reading between Sits. On busy days I don’t get much personal work done, but I’m seldom that busy. My mind tends to wander away from the hard work of writing copy for my Small Product Photography Site and working on images for my Fine Art Site. I have also been slack in my attention to Etsy and Fine Art America. My eBay business has been a bit of a disappointment and I am thinking of giving away or possibly trading all my remaining Hawaiian Shirts. I’ve watched couple of episodes of Barter Kings and now think anything is possible.
I’ve also taken up Cycling again and have plans on riding in the Hotter Than Hell Hundred next year. So I am riding my bike about ten hours a week and doing a few aerobic workouts while I am on the road. Naturally I’ve started blog about my new bicycle quest, 50 Years 100 Miles.
During my usual manic phase I have also gone back to work on one of my vampire novels. I had originally planned to bang it out in a coupe of weeks, but I have been at work on it for a few months now and there is no sign that it will be finished any time soon. I am getting in about a thousand words a day and its up to Chapter 7, which means I’m about a third through. I’m planning on going the self published Kindle Etc route, if I ever get the thing finished.
So all in all I’m keeping busy and getting a few things done. Sigh. Time to make the donuts.