When Your Freelance Employer Owes You $1K (Always)
Was there something wrong with the invoice that I made out of a Word template
Did my logo made by designy friend not make it look even more Official
Here’s this document i made in word. it says here its an invoice, see? and it says my name which is now a business. anyway plz pay me, i have 0 accountant, have signed 0 contracts, and have 0 clout at all but please pay me, see this invoice?
Hello, about that outstanding payment
“Hi! How was your weekend? Way too much ice cream was ingested over here haha—by the way, do you by any chance have that check we talked about from April? And haha the one from May?”
Is this deadline flexible like my pay within 24 hours clause on my invoice is flexible
I know I’m part of the most spoiled rotten generation since dinosaurs got to stomp all over Earth doing whatever the hell they felt like with their big dinosaur feet and teeth, but money, please for the work I did, all I want
Perhaps there is something wrong with the quality of my work
Molly Lorz lives in New York.
Everyone Ends Up Liking Her More Than You
There may come a time in your life when your mother will ask you the following question: “When can I visit your office?”
France’s Housing Shortage Continues
Reuters has a special report looking at France’s housing shortage, which has some homeless families squatting in an empty office block with the support of the housing minister.
Kanye West, Hunger Artist
Kanye West has spent the weeks leading up to the release of “Yeezus” demanding the world consider and respond to his new material and also insisting he doesn’t care what any of us thinks of it. We might be surprised by this seemingly paradoxical position, if it wasn’t such a familiar stance.
One notable antecedent for this conflict is Franz Kafka, for whom the relationship between artist and audience was a particularly knotty issue—and who memorably explored the relationship in his short story “Ein Hungerkünstler” (“A Hunger Artist”). Although Kafka stipulated that almost his entire body of work be destroyed upon his death, this short story was one of the few pieces he directed be saved from the flames, suggesting that Kafka saw it as having some hermeneutical power over the rest of his oeuvre.
In Kafka’s story, his unnamed narrator begins by explaining that, in past decades, the European public took great interest in what he calls “professional fasting.” A “hunger artist,” he tells us, could make a good living traveling from town to town, starving himself. The artist would sit in “a small barred cage” in the town square, where the public could pay to view his emaciated figure, and marvel at his self-denial and fortitude. After forty days, with great fanfare, the hunger artist’s impresario would shut down the operation, arranging for the (yes, starving) artist to be tenderly carried out over the shoulders of “two young ladies, blissful at having been selected for the honor.” The town rejoiced; the hunger artist moved onto the next town, the next square, the next barred cage. READ MORE
Good Work Margaret Sullivan, Good Work Annie Lowrey
Perhaps in response to the public editor’s column a few weeks ago on the lack of regular poverty coverage in the NYT, today Annie Lowrey presents six faces of minimum wage, just because. And in the business section!
My Visit to a Life Coach
In 2010, I was feeling stuck at my job and thinking about making a big career change. I was the marketing manager at a small business in the urban forestry field. I loved the people I worked with and enjoyed some of my responsibilities, but not as many as I wanted, and I was concerned that I wasn’t very passionate about urban forestry. But I was having a deeply fulfilling experience doing something else: For two years I’d been volunteering in my free time with an animal welfare non-profit, and I considered pursuing a full-time, paying job in the field. A big change was exciting to contemplate, but it was accompanied by concerns that I would end up utterly consumed by the work, emotionally fatigued, and not earning enough to make a living. I decided that I wanted to see a life coach for guidance.
My brother and dad had both seen a life coach named David whom they loved. They cautioned that he was eccentric, but great. He required two two-hour sessions ($300 each), but beyond that, any contact with him was completely up to you. Expect to talk about everything in your life with him, they told me. Both of them confessed to occasionally becoming very emotional, even tearful, during sessions. I sympathized, but wasn’t concerned that this would be an issue for me (foreshadowing!). READ MORE
We’ll Never Stop Worrying About Those Nest Eggs
“It’s crazy that we ended up with this as our retirement system,” said Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. The 401(k), she says, was intended as a supplement to a traditional pension and to Social Security. “It was supposed to be money that you could use to go to Paris,” she said. “Instead, it’s become our basic system.”Because we depend on accounts like 401(k)’s, she said, we should strengthen them through measures like mandatory automatic enrollment and incentives for employee contributions of at least 10 percent of wages, with an employer match equal to half of those paycheck deductions.
At the Times, Jeff Sommer has been looking at the retirement savings crisis over the last few weeks, showing why a $1 million nest egg ($1 million being symbolic of American savings goals) may no longer be enough for retirees to live on without some other kind of supplemental income. The really sad part is that most of us are far from the $1 million mark (“the median financial net worth of American households of all ages, excluding homes and cars, is $10,890, as estimated by Edward N. Wolff, an economics professor at New York University”), and simply telling people they need to save more isn’t really going to solve anything. John C. Bogle, the founder of Vanguard, recently told The Philadelphia Inquirer that the American retirement system is “facing a train wreck.” We hear Australia has a pretty good model.
Photo: walknboston
My Career is a Handicraft
“It feels like my whole career is just this patchwork quilt of different jobs.” — Rachel Bailey, 26, to Marketplace Money
My career is a collage made of torn up pieces of construction paper and paste.
My career is a pointillist painting where up close it’s just some dots and then you move further back and it’s still dots, but smaller.
My career is one of the those fake stained glass kits that looks like it’s really easy and fun but your hand isn’t that steady and the nozzle is too big and you end up with blobs of toxic goo congealed on a plastic disk and it only sort of looks like a butterfly, if you squint, but your mom keeps it in her bedroom window anyway and says she likes it but you know she’s disappointed and frankly so are you.
My career is a lopsided bowl you made in a pottery class at the community center because you thought it’d be a sexy hobby to try out like in the movies and it was kind of fun but no one caressed your neck and also now you have this ugly bowl and clay stains on your favorite shoes. READ MORE
The Self-Governing Office
Consider, for instance, the fact that hiring at Menlo is handled by committee, with each applicant spending a little bit of time with a group of employees, until a consensus can be reached. That same collective decision-making happens during promotions, layoffs, and flat-out firings.
Consider next the charts in the corner of the office, which display the names and titles of the Menlo employees and also their corresponding pay grades. When I first saw them, I was standing in the midst of a scrum of Menlonians, and I suggested—thus belying my own, frankly square work experience—that it might be a little unnerving to have your salary exposed to your colleagues. And the guy standing to my right actually scoffed. “No,” he said. “It’s the opposite. It’s liberating.”
In this week’s New York magazine, Matthew Shaer examines workplaces that use “horizontal management” rather than hierarchical management—which basically means that things are run without traditional bosses and more like King Arthur’s round table where no one is seated at the head, and everyone sort of self-governs themselves. Shaer visits the headquarters of Menlo Innovations in Ann Arbor, Mich. where programmers work in pairs, hiring and firing decisions are made by the team as a whole, and in a relatively new development, employee titles and pay grades are displayed openly on a wall. The employee-retention rate at Menlo is high and everyone feels a sense of ownership. It’s not perfect, but it’s working.
Saudade
Picture Massachusetts in April. There is a certain serenity and long-lifeness in the air, as if it were a habitable place and not merely to be hurried through. Children fly kites and play ball. The inquisitive chickadee, the blackbirds, and the song sparrow tell of expanding buds. One hears the pine warbler and the hum of a few insects,—small gnats, etc.—and sees considerable growth and greenness.
In the town of Andover, in the bowels of a stark IRS building, racks of blinking servers hum gently as they ingest packets of e-file data via ZMODEM protocol. To the north, a barking coxswain guides the hardy young men of the Phillips Academy crew team swiftly over the broad bosom of the Merrimack, while shad and alewives flit beneath them in the brisk, blue current. Along the riverbanks, one observes the large and conspicuous flowers of the hibiscus, covering the dwarf willows and mingling with the leaves of the grape. The noon of the year is approaching. Nature seems meditating a siesta. READ MORE
