Month: December 2013

This may not be too clear. After staying up till two, rising before nine to work, then working almost straight from 9:30 to 3:30 the next morning, I’m not at my most clear-headed.

Yesterday I was hoping to finish the project, but I had to postpone the deadline. Edits came through after eleven last night, and I knew I wouldn’t sleep at all if I tried to get it done. I have some breathing room now, but I’m not thrilled with it.

My professor in college (uni), Dr. O, warned about this. Next project I’ll put on an irreversible gate system where once something is nailed down and approved, any further changes will push the project deadline back and increase customer cost. I’m absorbing a lot of lost hours here.

But nobody ever said education was cheap. Enough complaining. It’s time to work.

After a fantastic day off yesterday, I was ready to go. And it’s a good thing, too — this mirror modelling job is due at 12:00 on Friday.

Next time, I’ll need my client to be more specific sooner. The job has morphed quite a lot and overall will have taken about 4 times the original proposed time. I’ll analyze for ideas on how to improve, but I know the problem is that the job grew as we went, moving from the original “just a couple pieces” to an assembly of 8 major components plus additional hardware. The scope wasn’t accurately enough nailed down at the beginning to protect from that, and I haven’t hard lined it at all.

Honestly, right now, satisfied clients mean more than hours, and I’m willing to put in the time for that. But I hope to be at the phase where I can avoid this soon; I don’t relish the though of too many 14 hour days.

And now I need to get back to this design, or I may not get to sleep tonight.

I stood on the edge, the water sparkling 30 feet below. “You can do it. Don’t psych yourself out.” But I already had. Then I heard the count.

3! — “I don’t know if I can do it.”

2! — “Would it really be bad not to jump?”

Jump! — My feet left the edge, I was absolutely free, my arms moving through nothing and my feet doing the same, then a plunge deep into the warm blue waters, and my head breaking the surface a moment later.

Friends help you take the plunge.

And Tuesday was awesome.

Alright, so I’m being honest here. I’m having a hard time feeling any enthusiasm right now. I just saw that yet another job I bid on closed without the client choosing a freelancer. This one is worse since they’d contacted me as one of their top three choices for the job, and I spent a couple of hours putting together a pretty detailed proposal. What went wrong? I wish dearly I could get a “Dear John” letter from each rejection, something that simply said “We’re not hiring you because of x, y and z.” But life isn’t like that. College is, but they don’t pay you to be in college. This is real.

So, one of my big goals for this month is to get better at writing proposals. I’m at less than 50% response rate, and again at less than 50% hire rate for those jobs where I do get a response. I need to improve those numbers or I’ll spend most of my time bidding jobs without profit. But how can I get better rates?

I don’t know yet. But I’ll definitely keep you guys informed on my experiments.

In other news, I had a beautiful day yesterday going up to the mountains, contemplating life and the direction of this next month. I’ve come up with 6 business goals:

1. Earn $1500 — $2000. This is a challenge, especially with a high stretch goal, but I know I can make at least one thousand in four weeks just repeating the success of the last two weeks. As long as I learn more this month than I knew 2 weeks ago, I can achieve this.

2. Bid 10 jobs per week and get response from more than %50 by the last week.

3. Get English students so I’ve got multiple streams of income and daily variety. I’ll also be working on a side blog that I started a while ago for ESL lesson plans, so teaching will help me generate useful content. My goal for the last week is 4 hours of teaching at 1000 baht per hour.

4. Finish my freelancing website and upgrade my ESL blog.

5. Spend less than $700 here.

6. Make a payment on my student loan. The loan is in default right now, so it’s going to take some paperwork to get things straightened out, but I need to start getting it paid off. My parents are starting to worry.

Alright, so those are the goals, and I’ll be writing each day about how I’m reaching them. Today I continued work on my second job incorporating the client’s design changes, I migrated my ESL blog to my new web host, I created a draft of handbills to advertise English teaching, and I got my freelance design website functioning.

More tomorrow. For now, I need food.

I just transferred $450 to my American account from my Elance total. So far I’ve earned $492 working there, and I still have a bit of work left to finish my second job, when I’ll get another ~$180. And I have only been an active freelancer for two weeks.

Three weeks ago, when I started poking around on freelancing sites to look for job possibilities, I never would have guessed I’d be earning money so quickly. At the time, I also wouldn’t have guessed that I’d getting to do something that, overall, I love. I suspected I’d be drudging through hours of work to support my independence instead of stepping into the nascence of my dream job.

This week is ending beautifully, but it was definitely off to a rough start. Last Thursday I discovered I’d left my card in an ATM. Machines here give you cash first and card second, so this is not my first time. I felt a bit foolish, but brushed it off and stopped by the bank the next day. But it was closed. I cursed the 4 p.m. start to the banker’s weekend and skimped to make it through to Monday.

Let me say here that my girlfriend did tell me to cancel the card. And if you ever do this, do that. I didn’t.

So when I got a new card on Monday, I discovered that my account had gone from more than 18,000 baht to less than 1000 baht. I’d lost over 17,000 baht in one fell swoop. I rest my head against the ATM bearing the bad news and felt completely discouraged.

The bankers said there was likely nothing they could do about the fraud, but I needed to file a report with the police and fax the report to a head office to even have a chance. A list of charges showed where the 17k had been spent over the last couple days. The f****r had spent most of my money at a club, with a little going to a trick auto store and a gym.

My girl helped me explain everything to the police, but neither of us had much hope. Just on the off chance, though, we decided to speak to the club and gym, in case they had any recollection of the guy.

We struck out with the club managers. They called the waiter who’d accepted the card and he couldn’t remember anything. They printed a copy of the signed receipts (f****r tried to copy my signature!). They wished us luck. They took no responsibility for accepting 10k of my money without checking an idea or comparing a signature.

But one of the waitresses told us to wait for her. We didn’t know what she wanted when she walked us to my scooter, and I was confused when she and my girl were speaking animatedly in Thai. Nin’ta said quickly to me, “We got him!” part way through the conversation, then kept speaking, much to my confusion.

The criminal was actually the waiter who ran my card. The waitress had seen him using it to by extra drinks, said that he had just bought a new part for his Honda and worked out at a gym. We knew who it was.

I rode away feeling like a television detective.

The gym had accepted the card for another month’s membership and had a copy of his Thai ID. A quick call to the club confirmed that it was the waiter. We knew him, had his picture, telephone number, email address — everything. I was shaking with angry excitement.

The police had found similar things, but hadn’t done anything. They promised to get in touch with him the following day.

On Wednesday I went in to collect my money. The only catch is, the boy didn’t pay, it was money from the club owners. Like all clubs here, they operate on the edge of the law, staying open later than is legal, and exist by bribing the police. And the police don’t want me to press charges.

I honestly don’t want to either. If I’d lost that money for good, I’d definitely be upset. It would change my life, tighten my already tight budget, and set me back on paying back college loans and saving for new adventures. But if I press charges, the boy will likely go to a Thai prison for more than 5 years and his life will never be the same.

I also don’t want him to get away with this scot free. He can’t do this again; I don’t want anyone else to suffer from me being too lenient, nor do I want him to feel like it’s okay.

So now I have a conundrum. If anyone out there is reading this, I’d be grateful for ideas.