Weird Job of the Week

I'm thinking about making my weird job of the week posts into a fairly regular series. Here's the first one.

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This job hasn’t actually started yet. It’s a continuing job for an existing client who wants twenty-five articles a week. After much hemming and hawing (on his part) a few weeks ago, I started and completed twenty-five articles about digital photo frames—twenty-five 500 word articles on the same thing. I don’t know if anyone who reads this blog can actually imagine trying to write 12,500 words on the same topic, and a fairly limited topic at that, but it was difficult.

Being as creative as I could about this mundane topic, I managed to come up with twenty-five articles. I wrote about making these frames into personalized presents for a number of different occasions, and I wrote about using the frames commercially. I wrote about using them in your home, and how they work, and what pictures you should put on them. By the end of this job, I was sick of trying to think of different ways to describe digital frames, and I was looking forward to receiving new topics.

Well, of course, the client needed a few days to get back to me after I had submitted all of the articles. What happened to the regular work that I had been promised? Very few clients who promise me regular work are ever actually organized enough to provide it. Then, a few days later, he informed me that he had lost his credit card, and he needed to get a new one before he could pay me…

About a week and a half later, I finally got paid, but I still didn’t have any information about more work. So, I focused on other clients, and I pursued a possible part time job offer. After my first week working at my local farmer’s market, I receive a number of messages asking if I was ready for more articles (this is now a month after I first started working for this guy).

After explaining that I had taken on some extra hours at the farmer’s market because I hadn’t heard from any of my clients, and explaining that this is a holiday weekend, we finally agreed on a deadline and a new number of articles. I was a little irritated at his impatience since I had been exceedingly patient with him.

So you might be wondering about the topic for this set of articles? There’s no new topic. I have to write eighteen more articles about digital frames, and another twenty-five the week after that. Maybe I can write a series about the many different ways you can destroy a digital frame. There’s water, fire, hammers….