Natasha Fondren

Blog posts with this title always perplex me. I’m not sure why they’re written or who they’re aimed at, because anyone deciding to quit their day job is an adult with a brain and can reason for him/herself. Not to mention that, as an adult, people are perfectly entitled to take their own risks, make their own mistakes, and choose the wrong path.

That seems to be the greatest fear of these blog posts: that someone will quit their day job and run out of money.

I say: so what? Really, what if you make the leap and fail?

I would hypothesize that the best things come from stumbling and making risky leaps.

I’m guessing that when you have no food in the house you will possess the logic to get out there and get a new day job or do whatever you have to do to survive. I’m guessing that if you have kids and a family you possess the intelligence to do something before your children starve. I’m guessing that if you make the leap, you considered how long you could go before you had to take a job.

If someone does not possess the above common sense, then undoubtedly a blog post is not going to help them. And again: so what if they fail?

Living and learning is the best part of life.

A blog post is so limited in scope that it can only skim the surface of the complexities of such a decision. It can’t examine the issue as deeply as one making the decision certainly has.

These posts for writers that examine the day job issue are prevalent, so they must serve some purpose I am missing.

I can’t say as I consulted a single article on quitting the day job when I leapt to full-time writing, but then I did that for music a year or two out of college. I’ve been self-employed in the arts for fifteen years. Is my experience blinding me to the usefulness of these posts?

I suspect they may reassure those who made the decision to keep their day job that they made the right one, and give courage to those who’ve decided to make the leap.

I’m wondering:

Why do these posts exist? What purpose do they serve? Do you enjoy reading them? Why? If I were to do a post on quitting the day job, what would you want to see? When reading such posts, what do you hope to get out of them?

Because I think I’ve forgotten. It cracks me up. I got drafted to volunteer for twenty minutes, because Glenn was volunteering for his friends, the campground owners, and his partner in crime wasn’t around to do his part of the cooking. But then the twenty minutes kept going on and on because they just didn’t have enough people, and his partner in crime was not doing any cooking.

I had not volunteered (this is not a charity; the owners are getting paid a ton for this), but when I got roped in, I said I’d stay until 5:30. One lady yelled at me because she wanted me to do something, and I was all, “I have no idea what you’re talking about, tell someone else. I was supposed to leave twenty minutes ago.”

And I have this idea in my head that when I establish a boundary, it will be respected. No, LOL.

She yelled something like, “I’m not telling someone else. You do it.” (I said no again, she yelled at me again.) She was pissed because she got sucked into working and it was her day off. (This campground works their camp hosts like CRAZY. The agreement is 18 hours a week in exchange for a site, but it’s more like 35-60 hours a week. And they all seem to put up with it, which is bizarre to me. They complain, but they all keep doing it. Is this a generational thing? They’re all 62-75.)

I should add that we are not camp hosts. We’re just paying customers. Glenn is happy to chip in because he’s friends with the hosts. I’m happy to volunteer to do water aerobics because I like my class. Otherwise, I’m too busy writing.

So I had had it, because I’ve been working from four a.m. to midnight, trying to get my WIP done. Slaving in a hot kitchen was not on the agenda, especially since I wasn’t getting paid and I hadn’t volunteered or committed to it in the first place.

So I walked away, because I knew if my body was there, people would keep asking me to do things. (I have no idea why they were asking me, since I don’t work there and I had not committed to doing anything.) And the other lady yelled, “I’m not supposed to be here, either!”

And I told her, “Then just walk away.”

She seemed rather astonished, as if this were a novel concept. And she continued working!!!

The whole thing is now hilarious. Is this what it’s like to work for someone else? You just have to put in extra time if they need it, even if they aren’t paying you extra and it wasn’t agreed upon?

LOL, that really sucks. Wow.

Now I truly understand why Zoe quit thirty-three jobs. I don’t mind working extra for myself (for even pennies an hour, evidently), but I’m not real good at the whole working-extra-for-someone-else thing.

Glenn, apparently, had a blast. He doesn’t mind, even if he got abandoned to do the job of two and a half people. That must be normal, too, what with all the downsizing and layoffs. He’s accustomed to working for people, and he just shrugs stuff like that off.

Fascinating. I feel like this was important research. It’s a side of the human experience I’d forgotten about; I’m completely out of touch with what it’s like to work for The Man.

So, if you have or had a day job, what is or was it like? Stories, please!