Day 106: 73 days later
Time flies like never before. It’s been 73 days since my last post and I have about 73 stories to tell. Yep, lots has happened, thus my excuse not to blog 
When I started this whole freelancing adventure of mine, I sort of new what to expect thanks to many freelancing blogs and advices from family/friends and others. Well, knowing what to expect and living thought it, are two totally different things. I mean, when you know it’s going to hurt, you’re still fine. When it actually hurts, you realize that you were rather optimistic when you though you knew it was going to hurt.
In the last 73 days I managed to get quite a bit of new contracts. Short ones, longer ones, easy ones, and some shoot-myself-in-the foot ones. Sometimes customer’s expectations are very unrealistic, usually deadline wise. I can implement anything, but I need time to do it. So facing a customer like that, there are only 3 choices. Choice 1, refuse the contract and let some else commit suicide. This choice will likely lead to the customer never contacting you again (in the near future). Which is probably fine, when you have been a freelancer for some time and you have a well established clientèle and a nice fat portfolio. If you’re still new to the game, refusing a contract is not an option. I might be too optimistic, but I find that the more difficult the customer is, the more experience I gain. Choice 2, try to educate the customer. Explain the procedure and why it will take that long. If it’s a new customer, this choice will most likely lead him/her to try to get someone else to do it. If you have already done some work for him/her then the likelihood of your customer lessening to you is slightly grater. Choice 3, take the bullet. Be a hero now and suffer when you get back to your home office.
I did end up choosing 3 more often then I should, which translated to many sleepless nights. The only thing that kept me going is the challenge and new experience. By learning the hard way, and chances of me not making the same mistake are lower. Even if my social life has been close to none, I don’t regret anything. (By the way, thanks to my wife for being so understandable and patient.)
I started practicing choice 2 on customers for whom I did some work previously. It worked for some, actually it worked for most. Sidenote: I noticed that when I charge more, they pay more attention to what I say. If I charge less, I find myself being treated more like an employee. So they tell me what to do and how much time I am being given to do it.
So far, it only happen once that I actually refused a contract (choice 1). I got to admit, it’s a strange feeling, a weird feeling, but I try not to look back. Some customers might actually respect you more for being honest and have a better image of you.
OK, so besides work, I did some more work. Different kind of work though. I organized few things. I’m already an organization freak (and I’m proud of it), but there were certain things that I have been putting aside for too long. I even made myself an excel sheet…actually I don’t use Excel. Instead I use IBM Lotus Symphony, which is free, and is not bad at all. I just love IBM stuff, specially their laptops. Anyways, so I made myself a list of what I know I have to do for my customers and I tried to come up with realistic time estimates. It came close to 500 hours. So my next post will be in about 4 moths. Just kidding.
Also, one of my main servers died on me. There is never a good time for a server to go offline when it’s being used 24/7. So between juggling projects, I ended up rebuilding a new server. I decided to go virtual this time and free. I’m running VirtualBox, and so far so good. I figured, next time hardware go bye bye, I’ll just have to copy the virtual OS image to a different computer and I’ll be back in business. That will be 10min of work instead of 1 day.
Another thing, I think I’m starting to understand what others mean by “isolation”. The other day I went to pick up mail and I felt like I don’t belong outside. The sun shining on my face felt weird. For a short second I thought about getting back to the cube land, but I like being a freelancer and I like programming. I just need to find time for other things.
I got much more to write about, but I will keep it for future posts. Yes, I will write again
Picture of the day: “Big Mac”, probably the only fish who have seen so much code in his life and will see much more.
