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I finally got down to invoicing the past 10 days of work, and the picture painted is not pretty. While the sum of this month's invoices so far have exceeded the miserable billings for all of April 2009 (less than 10% of my monthly "nut"), that's not really the standard against which I like to measure my progress.
What made the exercise particularly frustrating was all the additional time an effort I had to put in to invoice a minuscule job (less than $50) for a French client, as said client is among an increasing number of customers who require their freelancers to register and then log into their corporate invoice tracking system, download a purchase order, sign it and save it electronically as a PDF, and then upload the result to their system.
I would be willing to bet money they don't subject the company that supplies toner for their office copier in this manner.
Mind you, all this hurly-burly would probably not be so annoying if the rate of payment were commensurately rewarding, or if the work was regular and sizeable, but neither is the case, and to add insult to injury, the payment terms are 60 days after the end of the invoicing month, so if the client actually sticks to their word, I ought to see my payment in the early days of October.
Said payment, by the way, would have barely covered the tab at the local beer garden, where Galina and I met Shannon and the grandkids yesterday afternoon. We split a pizza, a tray of soft drinks, and a chocolate brownie ice cream sundae, and had a good time. We even made it back to the house in time for me to meet with Marnie, a young woman who hails from the north of England and makes her living here in Pagosa as a dog trainer.
Our session was a real eye-opener for me. The immediate goal is to get Shiloh to stop pulling on her leash when we go for a walk. Marnie pointed out that Shiloh has never known any other mode of taking a walk, and thus assumes that choking1 herself is part of the routine (and worse, she considers this annoyance to be an acceptable part of taking a walk).
Anyway, by the time we were finished, Shiloh actually was beginning to catch on (and so was I). Marnie estimates it'll take a week or two of constant practice to get both Shiloh and me trained.
Work is not exactly piling up, but what work I have is ready to be done.
Cheers...
1FWIW, I do not use any kind of device intended to choke Shiloh, e.g., a choke chain that, if you've never seen one, operates like a slip knot. Shiloh wears only a collar of fixed diameter, but pulls hard enough on the lead that the collar effectively presses down on her windpipe.
What made the exercise particularly frustrating was all the additional time an effort I had to put in to invoice a minuscule job (less than $50) for a French client, as said client is among an increasing number of customers who require their freelancers to register and then log into their corporate invoice tracking system, download a purchase order, sign it and save it electronically as a PDF, and then upload the result to their system.
I would be willing to bet money they don't subject the company that supplies toner for their office copier in this manner.
Mind you, all this hurly-burly would probably not be so annoying if the rate of payment were commensurately rewarding, or if the work was regular and sizeable, but neither is the case, and to add insult to injury, the payment terms are 60 days after the end of the invoicing month, so if the client actually sticks to their word, I ought to see my payment in the early days of October.
Said payment, by the way, would have barely covered the tab at the local beer garden, where Galina and I met Shannon and the grandkids yesterday afternoon. We split a pizza, a tray of soft drinks, and a chocolate brownie ice cream sundae, and had a good time. We even made it back to the house in time for me to meet with Marnie, a young woman who hails from the north of England and makes her living here in Pagosa as a dog trainer.
Our session was a real eye-opener for me. The immediate goal is to get Shiloh to stop pulling on her leash when we go for a walk. Marnie pointed out that Shiloh has never known any other mode of taking a walk, and thus assumes that choking1 herself is part of the routine (and worse, she considers this annoyance to be an acceptable part of taking a walk).
Anyway, by the time we were finished, Shiloh actually was beginning to catch on (and so was I). Marnie estimates it'll take a week or two of constant practice to get both Shiloh and me trained.
Work is not exactly piling up, but what work I have is ready to be done.
Cheers...
1FWIW, I do not use any kind of device intended to choke Shiloh, e.g., a choke chain that, if you've never seen one, operates like a slip knot. Shiloh wears only a collar of fixed diameter, but pulls hard enough on the lead that the collar effectively presses down on her windpipe.
