A JOB A DAY

Over three months ago I posted about EOFY. I just read that again 
(actually I've been surprised to find that I really like reading my 
own posts, especially given that I forget what I've written very 
quickly, "hey this guy's great! Oh yeah, he's me...") and really 
it's surprising that I talk about anything else because that post 
basically summarises 90% of my practical daily thoughts. Money, 
really. How to make it, and my answers are completely confused and 
contradictory at this point, without much hope of resolution unless 
I just stumble my way to some sort of success.

What I do like about working for myself, and generally aiming to do 
everything myself because other humans are way too expensive, is 
the variety. Granted I lose that pretty quickly as soon as I get 
stuck on something, and since quick projects have proved not to 
sell I'm spending months stuck working on... well mainly 
software/firmware stuff. But besides that, there are a lot of 
individual jobs that need doing at relatively infrequent intervals, 
just for a few days, and I quite enjoy that. Things like assembling 
a batch of devices, ordering parts, the initial design, building 
prototypes, writing documentation, marketing, customer service 
(though the "my order never arrived" complaints are never fun, not 
least because there's not much help to be found from the postal 
service). Indeed programming and hardware/software debugging are in 
there too but they just overstay their welcome. It's odd to think 
that most people in the associated industry/ies do just one of 
these jobs, endlessly, every working day.

Back to my last post about hobbies, maybe this is another 
definition (and one that I'm sure I've heard before). A hobby is a 
job that you enjoy, but wouldn't want to do every day. So I'm 
aiming to live in a world of hobbies? Probably not quite, but 
there's a certain aspect of that for sure. My main problem though 
is that I've really never experienced a money-earning job that I 
could imagine wanting to do for more than my week-long "hobby 
duration". I _could_ do the job, but a month in I'd be as grumpy, 
bitter, and angry as I could get about the whole thing.

For the last couple of days I've been ordering parts - a wonderful 
excuse to spend more money than I ever do on anything else (car 
maintenance and bills aside). Great fun digging down to find the 
best deals, while also being able to refer to the original design 
to confirm where cheaper parts can be substituted. It's a wonderful 
world where the thrill of finding a few hundred of a $0.45 part for 
$0.20 as part of a clearance sale is enough to make my day. For 
those who haven't had the pleasure, the task goes more or less 
like: "If I get 400 the total price is x, but to get 1000 costs 
x+(1/4*x) given the price breaks so... no wait here's a lot of 
20,000 for about the same as x, oh but then it's $11.81 postage, 
but I wonder if they have any parts for that other thing that needs 
re-ordering soon, and I can distribute that postage cost". It's 
great fun, for a day or two, after which I start to drown in all 
the numbers, my eyes are strained from looking at the computer 
monitor, I can feel myself getting fatter as I fail to move for 
hours on end, and the passion that drove me to shave $0.02 off the 
cost of that transistor has withdrawn to leave me meerly comparing 
the same part number between a couple of catalogues. I'm sick of 
it, not doing a very good job of it (though probably as good as any 
non-obsessive who'd spending someone else's money), and definitely 
need to go and drill holes in some electronics enclosures or 
something.

But back to my EOFY post, I actually wrote that partly to motivate 
myself to make a start on preparing my tax return. But as always 
there were too many things that always needed to be done yesterday, 
so as with every year it's only a couple of weeks until its due at 
the end of the month and I haven't even started. Weekdays are still 
devoted to getting some multitude of projects finished so I'll be 
doing it on the weekends, or trying to but distracting myself with 
nonsense like this so that I'll probably still have to finish it in 
business time. But the point is, it's time to be an accounant for a 
few days. Actually that's pretty similar to parts ordering, so I'm 
probably about to get sick of it even quicker than usual.

 - The Free Thinker