Work From Home Couple

In my last post, right below this one, I wrote about the tough 2008 I had on the freelance-writing beat. I wrote more stories than ever, but still made less money than I did in 2007 or 2006. The reason? More of my assignments paid lower rates. The big payers were few and far between, thanks, I guess, to the rough economy and general upheaval in the publishing business.

Despite that, though, I still believe that nothing beats both working from home and working for yourself. I do both, and I know I’d hate any alternative.

Here’s why. One of my freelance jobs involves editing a commercial real estate trade magazine in Chicago. I go into the office once every two weeks or so. The job is a big one, and comes complete with health insurance. But going into the office is one big drag.

That’s always been the case. But it’s worse now. Now I have to listen to all the salesmen, who are struggling desperately to sell ad space in the magazine, sit in their cubicles and sigh. And if they aren’t sighing, they’re reading aloud dismal statistics from the Wall Street Journal or CNN. It’s enough to make you want to hang yourself by your necktie. (Good thing I’m one of the few male employees there without a necktie!)

If that’s not bad enough, I often receive visits from an assistant publisher who’s especially despondent. I can’t blame him, though. He’s the one in charge of firing people if sales don’t pick up. The last time I went to the office, late last week, he stopped by my cubicle twice to shake his head and tell me which rival magazine or industry publication decided to shut its doors.

I know it’s bad out there. Believe me. My wife and I were considering refinancing our mortgage loan. Turns out, though, that our home is no longer worth what we paid for it three years ago. There go those potential savings!

But as a work-from-homer, and as a freelancer responsible for my own well-being, I think I’m in better shape to survive the downturn. I can always work harder and more creatively. I can change my strategy if things aren’t working: Instead of searching for higher-paying jobs, I can change up and take on as many lower-paying, but easy to complete, writing assignments as possible. I’m learning that you can’t force the writing industry to change. You have to instead anticipate those changes and react to them.

It’s not a perfect system, that’s for sure. But it does beat the alternative. I wouldn’t trust any full-time employer these days.

I know a bit about real estate: I’ve written about residential real estate for more than a decade, for newspapers and trade magazines. During this time, real estate agents — and everyone involved with the buying and selling of homes, actually — have been quick to remind me just how important they are.

Agents help buyers purchase homes for a fair price. They help negotiate with sellers. They … Well, I’m sure they do something else. I just don’t know what it is.

As the rains keep coming here in the Midwest, I have this to say in response to all those real estate agents: You’re wrong. You’re not important at all. In fact, you’re rather useless.

I say this because my basement is flooding today. Again. We’ve owned our little house for three years now. This is the fifth time our basement has flooded.

As you may or may not know, sellers are required to disclose when their homes have basements that flood. Our sellers did not disclose this. In fact, they checked a box on the sales contract that said their basement was dry.

Well, either they were incredibly fortunate during the eight years they live here or they’re liars. I opt for the second.

Fine. Problem is, not one of the real estate professionals who helped us buy this house has been able to help us remedy this situation. Our real estate agent did come over the day after our first flood and frowned, tsked and sighed. But she didn’t know what else to do. We contacted the real estate attorney the state of Illinois requires in every housing transaction only to be told by him that it’s probably not worth our time to try to prove in court that our sellers lied. The home inspector who’s supposed to help find things like this was quick to cover his own butt, saying quickly that it was a dry day when he did our inspection. I’ll make sure to schedule our next home inspection, should we buy again, during a deluge.

The frustrating thing is that none of these people — most of whom we paid to look out for our interests — have done a thing to help us now that we actually need them. Sure, they’re all peppy and “helpful” when they’re completing the routine tasks that go with the buying and selling of a home. But when you actually need them to do something they don’t do 1,000 times a day, they shrug their shoulders.

The advice we’ve gotten is that we should just suck it up and pay to have the basement waterproofed. That’s what we are going to do, unfortunately. It’s just a shame that people in the real estate industry are so useless. I guess it’s no surprise that the housing industry is falling apart. For years, the people who worked in it were unethical, corrupt, lazy and stupid. Of course the industry is going to fall apart.

I don’t like to rub it in the faces of my friends too much, but sometimes I can’t help it: Working from home beat the pants off working in an office.

Need proof? Spend the week in Chicago, where I live, during a fierce round of snowstorms. Then you’ll see. We’ve had some nasty winter weather this week: Sub-zero temperatures, strong winds and snow, of course, lots and lots of snow. It’s added up to some extremely long commute times.

I have a friend who lives 12 miles from his office. One day this week it took him 2-and-a-half hours to get home. I’m sure he was thrilled, cooped up in that car listening to some lame radio station, that Chicago will have a White Christmas this year.

Meanwhile, that same night, my commute was exactly zero minutes. I was working from home, and my commute meant walking from the kitchen to my office, about three feet away. Can’t beat that.

Yes, there are some pitfalls of working from home: Sometimes you forget to stop working. Other days, your personal life and business life blends together. Others often fail to take your career seriously because you don’t drive into an office every day.

But those are minor nuisances compared with the trials most of my office-working friends face. And those snowstorms this week and last provided just one more example.

One of the publishers whom I write for came to me with an opportunity. The publisher wanted to know if I’d be interested in editing a new quarterly publication they’d just agreed to produce for the National Association of Realtors.

Problem is, the price they were offering was fairly low, and there was no room for negotiation. I had a decision to make.

On the one hand, the offer was not terrible. It would be fairly steady work as the publisher would need me to tackle the work four times a year. Also, this has been a rough year. I’ve already taken several jobs that normally I would not have added to my schedule just to make up for the high number of my writing clients who have either gone out of business or stopped using freelancers.

In the end, I negotiated just a bit, earned a very small increase to the initial offer and accepted this new offer.

Two years ago? Even one year ago? I probably would have passed. But this is one tough economy. As a freelancer, I need a constant stream of work to pay the bills. So I’m working harder than I ever have just to stay above water.

I’m sure I’m not alone in this. But until the economy turns around, and until magazines stop losing advertisers, I’ll probably keep accepting work I normally would pass up. Of course, it could be worse, far worse, so I’m still counting my blessings.

The election of Barack Obama cheered my heart for many reasons. First, he wasn’t George Bush. That’s a miracle in itself. Secondly, it was someone new, some fresh blood. And thirdly, Obama actually had some progressive thoughts on how to fix the economy, fund education and improve health care.

But to me, the biggest positive of an Obama presidency is that the United States finally, finally elected someone to its highest office who wasn’t an old, white man.

Now, I have nothing against old white men. I am one, after all. But it was incredibly discouraging to a country that is supposed to pride itself on its diversity that African-Americans, women, Hispanic-Americans, Asian-Americans or anyone else who wasn’t white could never realistically hope to see someone who looks like them in the Oval Office.

That’s changed. Amazing!

It’s my fervent hope that the election of a bi-racial president is a sign that the United States is becoming an even bigger melting pot. I wonder if the future face of America is my 9-year-old niece, who is half white and half Jamaican. I wonder if my one family, which includes a Caucasian 9-year-old and a 15-month-old Ethiopian represents the future of U.S. families.

The movie Bulworth with Warren Beatty wasn’t the best film around. But the title character did have a point when he suggested that the United States would only get over its race problem when enough members of different races began having sex with each other and producing mixed-race offspring. Only when everyone was bi-racial would the country get over its obsession and struggle with race.

Well, we’re certainly not at that point yet. But sometimes I wonder: When I look at my own family, which now includes members who are part Jamaican, who come from Ethiopia, who are part Filipino and are part Hispanic, or my friends — one of whom has adopted from Guatemala and another who is waiting to adopt from China — I see what I think will be the future of the country. And, I have to say, I’m thrilled.

Because I work from home, as does my wife, I’m sure you’re interested in knowing my thoughts on current DVD releases. What? You’re not? Surely, you’re joking.

My wife and I are home a lot. We have a 15-month-old child who goes to bed at 7 p.m. It’s not like we’re going anywhere once that happens. So we watch a lot of movies and television series on DVD thanks to our trusty Neftlix account. So I know movies. (Or at least I like to think I do.)

And here’s another thing I know: Ben Still isn’t that funny anymore. And he plays the same lunk-headed character too much. I also know that his latest movie, the big summer comedy Tropic Thunder isn’t funny, either. It is loud. It is busy. It is bloody in scenes. But it’s just not funny.

I will give the movie credit for one funny bit. Robert Downey Jr., one of our best actors, if you ask me, stars as a pompous Academy Award-winning Australian actor. He wins the part of the main African-American character in the fake movie that forms the basis of Tropic Thunder’s story. Of course, Downey Jr.’s not African-American. In the film, his character undergoes a medical procedure that darkens his skin’s pigmentation. He also stays in character throughout the movie, constantly spouting “y’alls” in what he mistakenly thinks is a terrific interpretation of how African-American characters talk. A real African-American actor in the film is constantly annoyed by Downey’s antics, and their scenes together are outstanding, and really funny.

The rest of the film? Boring. Jack Black, who’s usually quite funny, is a complete waste here. He’s not important to the story and doesn’t even have any funny lines, unless you consider him describing how he would give one of the characters a blowjob funny stuff. (It could have been, I suppose, but it’s not in this movie.)

Tom Cruise turns in an interesting performance as a horrid Hollywood studio head, all bald head and bear-rug-furry arms. But he’s not on screen enough. And Ben Stiller, of course, goes through the movie making his usual dumb monkey faces. It seems like his Zoolander character escaped for that movie and made it to the jungles of Laos.

To sum up: Melt your Tropic Thunder discs and seek out a comedy that’s actually funny. The 40-year-old Virgin fits that bill. This loud, annoying movie does not.

I sometimes think that the state prisons in Illinois should be named after our state’s former governors. After all, the odds are good that at any given time, you’ll find an Illinois governor or former governor stewing in one of their cells.

Our bad-haired Illinois governor, Rod Blagojevich, was arrested yesterday. He was convicted, among many, many things, of trying to sell the Illinois Senate seat left behind by incoming president Barack Obama. He also threatened to withhold financial assistance to the Tribune Company, which is trying to sell the Chicago Cubs, unless it fired certain editors he did not like.

No, Gov. Blagojevich is not exactly one of the good guys. He also has a bit of a potty mouth to go with that awful haircut of his. The official transcript of Blago’s indictment is filled with language that everyone in my house last heard this weekend when I spent the entire day building an entertainment cabinet for my living room.

Anyway, because I do work from home, I was able to take a few minutes here and there to watch the press conferences and press coverage of Gov. Rod’s big day yesterday. Yes, he was led away from his home in handcuffs yesterday. Very humiliating, I’m sure.

He’s the sad part, though. If our scummy governor is convicted, he’ll undoubtedly serve his time in a fairly comfortable jail. Meanwhile, the local drug dealer — who’s been surrounded by poverty and bad breaks his or her entire life — will go the kind of jail where you don’t want to turn you back on anyone. What if we put white-collar criminals — who do far more harm than any one drug dealer ever does — into the worst of the worst of our prisons? Think the prospect of spending some quality time with murderers might not stop a government official or two from robbing from his or her constituents? I think it must might.

Every year, the town in which I live publishes a community guide. Like 99 percent of the population, I immediately turn to the section that lists the average household income for the area to find out where I rank.

Well, as of this moment, our household is exactly average when it comes to annual income. I don’t know if I should be relieved or horrified. Because I’m a writer, our annual household income had generally been below the average. I’m not sure if the rest of our community’s households have suffered a big dip in annual income or we’ve just grown ours enough to hit the average.

My wife and I are above average in one category: age. The average age of a resident of our Chicago suburb is 36.6. I’m about four years over that. My wife — the cradle robber — is about four-and-a-half years over it. Sigh, as if my aching knees didn’t give me clue enough, I’m officially old.

The average income thing used to be a bigger deal for me. I remember fretting that my writing income wasn’t producing enough money to purchase big-screen TVs or long, exotic vacations. But whenever I get gloomy about this, my wife reminds of one fact: As a freelance writer, I’m able to work from home. Both my wife and I have always been around for our kids. And even though we don’t have great stuff in our house, we have good-enough stuff.

She makes a lot of sense. I think we hit the high-water mark this year as far as competing with the rest of our suburb. I’m fairly certain “average” is about as high as I can aspire to without a career change. But that average salary is worth a lot more when you figure in all those office meetings and cubicle lunches I get to skip.

We had our first fun holiday party last night. A friend of ours has one in early December each year. It’s a nice time to let the kids run wild, eat way too much sweets and catch up on what’s happened to everyone during the last year.

It’s much, much different than the holiday parties I’d be forced to attend if I worked full-time in an office. County avoiding those as yet another perk of working from home.

At a real holiday party — one thrown by friends or family members, not joyless, cold-hearted corporations — you learn all sorts of interesting tidbits. For instance, one of our friends mentioned that he arrived in the host’s neighborhood a bit early. He and his wife stopped at a local Dunkin’ Donuts to kill some time. Amazingly, they each purchased one Dunkin’ Munchkin.

So, apparently, if you’re really cheap, you can buy a single Munchkin. Who knew?

I imagined the shopkeeper shouting to his wife: “Hey, honey! Relax! We can pay the mortgage now! These guys each ordered a single Munchkin!” Or maybe the newspaper headline the next morning would read: “A-Holes purchase Donut Holes.”

See what I mean? You don’t get good stuff like that at the office party.

Sometimes, when working from home the temptation is to view your kids as little critters designed to prevent you from getting anything done. We’ve all felt this way. There is no shame in admitting it.

But, when you work from home you have a great opportunity to teach your kids a thing or two about the way the working world operates. For instance, I think it does kids a great service to know that there are times when you absolutely have to work, even if you don’t want to. You may want to go outside and play catch. But if a deadline looms, that work has to be done first.

That’s a valuable lesson for kids. It teaches them that there is such a thing as delayed gratification. Too many kids today get whatever they want whenever they want it. (And no, I’m not the old man on the block who yells at the kids to get off my lawn. I just sound like it sometimes.)

This weekend, I took my oldest son to our local theater to see A Christmas Carol. My wife had been working on putting together the customers for Scrooge, the ghosts and Marley for weeks before the show opened. My son watched her spending long evenings whipping everything into shape. He even tried on Tiny Tim’s costume. Then he got to see the results of all that hard work on the stage.

Here’s another good lesson for kids: Yes, sometimes you do have to work hard. But there is something enormously satisfying about completing a job and doing it well.

So if you do work from home, remember to take the opportunity to share the work you do with your kids. It’ll be time well spent.