I'm going back to work part time.
Yep, as of Monday next week, I'll be leaving the house mid-mornings 3 days a week for a half-day gig at an office job.
This has been kind of spur of the moment and is perhaps a little bit off the track I was on, but is necessary at this point if I am ever to have a hope of succeeding at the projects I've recently undertaken, especially since it's such a battle to find the time I need to put in to move things along.
At the moment, it's very slow going, since having all of the kids home during the day and having to do school with the older two in the mornings takes a large chunk out of my production time in a day, not to mention my sanity! Simply put, it's just a bit more than I can handle and I desperately need to get out of the house and spend some time in adult company for a change as well.
Getting out of the house for a few hours a couple of days per week while earning some predictable income means that I can count on a certain amount of guaranteed income per month, which will go toward deposits for getting the kids back into their old school next year. This will allow me to spend more time getting stuck into production and letting the world know what I've got to offer! It also means that I should be able to pick up a few more printing supplies in the meantime, which will allow me to do a bit more than I've been able to do up until this point.
The whole thing sort of came about as a result of a discussion #hubbyparkins and I were having a month or two back regarding a few things that he needed to get sorted out at work in order to make it possible for him to earn better. I offered to help him part time with his admin if it would mean more income for him. Then, last week, he asked me if I would still be willing to help him out, to which I obviously said that I would. He then mentioned it back at the office and I've been asked to come in on a part-time, temporary contract to do some sales for the company.
This will free him up to do some actual delivery and project management instead of having to focus on getting the jobs on the board first, which means higher overall production for the company and therefore higher income. Which means less stress for me in terms of having to make money out of my new business/es *right now*. Which means peace and harmony all 'round.
Things were starting to get a bit hairy there for a little while. It took losing a fake baby for me to realise that I was taking on more than I could cope with and then beating myself up for it when the inevitable exhaustion set in and I couldn't keep up anymore.
This way, things are broken down into smaller, more manageable targets for me. First things first - making the income to get the kids back into school next year (and giving myself some time away from them so that I don't turn Paula Yates on anyone's ass). Then I get to focus my attention more intensively on the printing and other projects. Granted, it means taking a bit longer to get my own show on the road. But considering that I'm still exclusively breastfeeding an infant, have a toddler about to turn 2 and have been homeschooling two older kids in different grades, on top of running a household of 6 people on a shoestring and trying to get two businesses off the ground, I think it's fair to say that cutting down the gradient and pacing myself a little is not tantamount to admitting defeat but rather pure common sense.
(Excuse me for a minute while I run to the bathroom and chant that last bit to myself in the mirror.)
And there you have it. After all my ranting over the years about the rat race and how I hated working for a boss, I'm selling out and going back for a while.
Rest assured that this does NOT mean you won't be seeing any progress on my printing and other projects! Keep watching this space, folks. Fortunately, #babyparkins is getting the hang of this teething thing now and has gone back to more or less sleeping through at night. This helps a LOT and I'm slowly working on setting up a bit of a web presence for the printing and copywriting businesses, getting acquainted with Wordpress in whatever spare time I can scrounge, and hopefully I'll have something to show for these efforts very soon!
In the meantime, the inspiration keeps flowing and I'm being slapped in the head with new ideas all the time! I can't wait to get a few of these out there and I'm *this close* to doing just that, so don't go anywhere!
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Thursday, August 19, 2010
World Gone Mad
So I go into semi-hibernation again for a few days to regroup and formulate my forward strategy and the universe goes off its head. What. The. Fuck.!?
I generally don't use my blog as a platform for political (or even social) commentary. I figure there are many, many talented bloggers and other interested parties out there who are way better equipped to express my thoughts on such things anyway. I'm kind of unoriginal in this particular sense, folks, and my position can more or less be stated as follows:
I don't care if you're purple or green or have tentacles or eyeballs growing out of your ears, or if you're just an ordinary, garden variety human being. I have no issue with you and will be happy alongside you when life treats you well, as long as it is not at the expense of another in any way, shape or form.
So it is with great concern that I look at what is going on around us at the moment, all these people who purport to be servants of the people and I can only shake my head at the callousness with which they can apparently abandon their ideals. Any sympathy I may initially have felt for the strikers, particularly those in the healthcare sector, has died along with those patients whose lives might have been preserved had they received the care they needed from these people.
The events unfolding over the past several days and the losses suffered by so many in the wake of this strike have been sobering, to say the least. The things I wrote in my last post hardly seem worth mentioning now, when there is so much more at stake out there and here I am, safe at home with my big, healthy family. My heart aches for those mothers who have lost real, live babies to the heartlessness of the politics of the land, to the greed and self-interest of the players on the big ole Monopoly board...
I was going to write a long, detailed post about a bunch of different things but I feel that it would be inappropriate to do that now.
You know, whatever the shortcomings in our country, for as long as I have had the freedom and the capacity to form my own opinions of this country and its people, I have held onto the ideal that we can make it work. That we can achieve true peace, harmony and wellbeing for every South African. That, with the right leaders encouraging the people to inform themselves, to think, speak and act for themselves, we could be so much more, be so much greater. When we lived abroad, I wore my South African identity with pride. But today I just feel shame.
Perhaps tomorrow someone will shake the planet and we'll all wake up from this nightmare?
I generally don't use my blog as a platform for political (or even social) commentary. I figure there are many, many talented bloggers and other interested parties out there who are way better equipped to express my thoughts on such things anyway. I'm kind of unoriginal in this particular sense, folks, and my position can more or less be stated as follows:
I don't care if you're purple or green or have tentacles or eyeballs growing out of your ears, or if you're just an ordinary, garden variety human being. I have no issue with you and will be happy alongside you when life treats you well, as long as it is not at the expense of another in any way, shape or form.
So it is with great concern that I look at what is going on around us at the moment, all these people who purport to be servants of the people and I can only shake my head at the callousness with which they can apparently abandon their ideals. Any sympathy I may initially have felt for the strikers, particularly those in the healthcare sector, has died along with those patients whose lives might have been preserved had they received the care they needed from these people.
The events unfolding over the past several days and the losses suffered by so many in the wake of this strike have been sobering, to say the least. The things I wrote in my last post hardly seem worth mentioning now, when there is so much more at stake out there and here I am, safe at home with my big, healthy family. My heart aches for those mothers who have lost real, live babies to the heartlessness of the politics of the land, to the greed and self-interest of the players on the big ole Monopoly board...
I was going to write a long, detailed post about a bunch of different things but I feel that it would be inappropriate to do that now.
You know, whatever the shortcomings in our country, for as long as I have had the freedom and the capacity to form my own opinions of this country and its people, I have held onto the ideal that we can make it work. That we can achieve true peace, harmony and wellbeing for every South African. That, with the right leaders encouraging the people to inform themselves, to think, speak and act for themselves, we could be so much more, be so much greater. When we lived abroad, I wore my South African identity with pride. But today I just feel shame.
Perhaps tomorrow someone will shake the planet and we'll all wake up from this nightmare?
Friday, August 13, 2010
Four
That's how many negative pregnancy tests I had before what appeared to be persistent pregnancy symptoms eventually made me call and schedule an appointment with my doctor.
I've mentioned this before, I know.
Four is also the number of beautiful and healthy babies I've been lucky enough to birth and love and who have turned my life into something that is nothing like what I had planned before that first unplanned pregnancy happened almost 9 years ago, but which I wouldn't trade for all the world...
So it doesn't make sense to me that having the doctor tell me this afternoon that I'm not pregnant took me by surprise and I find myself grieving over a baby I wasn't even going to have. And yet, here I sit, tapping away at my keyboard while the screen blurs in front of my streaming eyes while my husband washes the dishes and the kids have their bath.
I know, rationally, that I'm being super unreasonable. I know that I have so very much to be happy about. I know that I'm supposed to not have wanted another baby. Apparently none of that matters, because I simply cannot stop myself from feeling a deep sense of loss and longing. For what was never more than an imagined baby. What's up with that?
I've mentioned this before, I know.
Four is also the number of beautiful and healthy babies I've been lucky enough to birth and love and who have turned my life into something that is nothing like what I had planned before that first unplanned pregnancy happened almost 9 years ago, but which I wouldn't trade for all the world...
So it doesn't make sense to me that having the doctor tell me this afternoon that I'm not pregnant took me by surprise and I find myself grieving over a baby I wasn't even going to have. And yet, here I sit, tapping away at my keyboard while the screen blurs in front of my streaming eyes while my husband washes the dishes and the kids have their bath.
I know, rationally, that I'm being super unreasonable. I know that I have so very much to be happy about. I know that I'm supposed to not have wanted another baby. Apparently none of that matters, because I simply cannot stop myself from feeling a deep sense of loss and longing. For what was never more than an imagined baby. What's up with that?
Kirby, Kirby, Kirby, Kirby AAAAAAAHHHHHRRRRRGGGG!!
I had to have a little giggle at this post on Lettice's blog this morning. I started leaving a long comment, but then I figured I'd blog it instead.
I, too, had a brief run as a Kirby sales person and let me tell you, selling Kirby's is up there among some of the dodgiest of dodgy jobs! The way that things are set up (here in SA, at least) is unsatisfactory to both the salesperson and the client!!
First, upon circling the very promising sounding advertisement in the classifieds and calling them up, they're very sketchy about telling you the name of the company. If you ever encounter this, know that you are about to walk into the clutches of a Kirby sales agency.
Secondly, in your "interview", you are expressly told that you will NOT be doing door-to-door sales but that appointments will be set up for you by telemarketers to do demonstrations. What they don't tell you is that 1) you will be required to go door-to-door to collect referrals for the telemarketers to call and 2) when the "telemarketers" call those people, they tell them that they have "won a free carpet shampoo".
So, in essence, you go door-to-door gathering phone numbers for the normal 8-hour working day period. You get chased by dogs, you get treated like a common beggar, you get all of the shit that goes hand in hand with being a door-to-door salesperson and then, when you return to the office, you then hand over all the numbers you've managed to gather to them and they then supposedly schedule appointments on your behalf. BUT they only give you 2 or 3 appointments each evening (after all, you have to spend some time with your family too, right?). They also don't tell you which of the referrals you brought in are converted into appointments and you are not permitted to cold-canvas your own potential client base. And they don't take into account what areas these appointments are in, so you may very well drive (at your own cost!) from Pretoria North to Centurion and then all the way back out to Brooklyn. Only to find that 1) this house is not one of the ones where you personally gathered the contact information, 2) the people aren't home or 3) they greet you very brusquely and make it very clear that they really didn't want the free carpet shampoo in the first place... etc.
At which point you are then expected to sell them a Kirby by means of a demonstration they are surprised to learn that they were meant to *watch*. Because if they had been told they would have to actually *be* there for the free carpet shampoo, they would've said "No, thank you."
And I won't even go into the whole deal about why people can't just go and buy a Kirby themselves, if they're interested! (I see that they now have a website, though, which I was unable to find back in my day...)
Basically, unless you're being stationed in a Kirby dealership with signage, stock on the shop floor and all the proper practices in place, you're going to do a lot of hard work for next to fuck-all, and you'll last a few days at it at best and maybe sell one machine, before you and most of your fellow recruits move on and are replaced by the newest bunch of saps to fall for what is essentially a poorly formulated pyramid-style sales scheme.
As for the demonstrations, the "practice" demonstrations really are supposed to be for practicing and people do get better and faster at doing them. This is why they are expected to do practice demos to at least 10 friends/family members. But they are also expected to create a "soft sell" scenario for the newbie sales guy. This is usually the period during which you will most likely sell your first/only Kirby, and also serves as the confidence booster you need to keep at it while they find the next lot of recruits (who will be replacing you shortly).
As far as the product itself is concerned, I totally agree: the Kirby is drastically overpriced and I believe that this is for a couple of reasons, the first of which is that, being an American import, the product's price is not suitably adjusted for the South African market. The second is that, even though local agents probably could adjust the price, doing so would lower their own income, instead of allowing them to ride the favourable Rand/Dollar exchange rate.
Despite these issues, it really *is* a fantastic machine. That's not to say I would buy one! They are heavy to carry and awkward to operate unless you have actually been trained and drilled on their use the way the sales guys are. Theoretically, you get free training when you buy the machine, but frankly, who has the time!?
One of Alet's other commenters mentioned that she'd spoken to an allergy specialist, who'd told her that the Kirby does not kill dustmites. As I recall, there has never been any claim made by Kirby that they *kill* dustmites. Rather, the claim is that the machine's far superior sucking action *removes* more dustmites from your surfaces than any other vacuum does, which I believe is quite true.
Basically, even though I suffered through 3 weeks of door to door canvassing for referrals during the day, followed by driving around at my own cost at night to then go and deliver free carpet shampoos to people who'd been hard-sold on having these "demonstrations" in the first place, and I managed only to sell one machine in all this time, I believe that Kirby is a good product. But I have no interest in having one demonstrated to me and I'm certainly not in the market to buy one. At the price, I'd rather buy a Genesis and suffer a bit of hayfever!
I, too, had a brief run as a Kirby sales person and let me tell you, selling Kirby's is up there among some of the dodgiest of dodgy jobs! The way that things are set up (here in SA, at least) is unsatisfactory to both the salesperson and the client!!
First, upon circling the very promising sounding advertisement in the classifieds and calling them up, they're very sketchy about telling you the name of the company. If you ever encounter this, know that you are about to walk into the clutches of a Kirby sales agency.
Secondly, in your "interview", you are expressly told that you will NOT be doing door-to-door sales but that appointments will be set up for you by telemarketers to do demonstrations. What they don't tell you is that 1) you will be required to go door-to-door to collect referrals for the telemarketers to call and 2) when the "telemarketers" call those people, they tell them that they have "won a free carpet shampoo".
So, in essence, you go door-to-door gathering phone numbers for the normal 8-hour working day period. You get chased by dogs, you get treated like a common beggar, you get all of the shit that goes hand in hand with being a door-to-door salesperson and then, when you return to the office, you then hand over all the numbers you've managed to gather to them and they then supposedly schedule appointments on your behalf. BUT they only give you 2 or 3 appointments each evening (after all, you have to spend some time with your family too, right?). They also don't tell you which of the referrals you brought in are converted into appointments and you are not permitted to cold-canvas your own potential client base. And they don't take into account what areas these appointments are in, so you may very well drive (at your own cost!) from Pretoria North to Centurion and then all the way back out to Brooklyn. Only to find that 1) this house is not one of the ones where you personally gathered the contact information, 2) the people aren't home or 3) they greet you very brusquely and make it very clear that they really didn't want the free carpet shampoo in the first place... etc.
At which point you are then expected to sell them a Kirby by means of a demonstration they are surprised to learn that they were meant to *watch*. Because if they had been told they would have to actually *be* there for the free carpet shampoo, they would've said "No, thank you."
And I won't even go into the whole deal about why people can't just go and buy a Kirby themselves, if they're interested! (I see that they now have a website, though, which I was unable to find back in my day...)
Basically, unless you're being stationed in a Kirby dealership with signage, stock on the shop floor and all the proper practices in place, you're going to do a lot of hard work for next to fuck-all, and you'll last a few days at it at best and maybe sell one machine, before you and most of your fellow recruits move on and are replaced by the newest bunch of saps to fall for what is essentially a poorly formulated pyramid-style sales scheme.
As for the demonstrations, the "practice" demonstrations really are supposed to be for practicing and people do get better and faster at doing them. This is why they are expected to do practice demos to at least 10 friends/family members. But they are also expected to create a "soft sell" scenario for the newbie sales guy. This is usually the period during which you will most likely sell your first/only Kirby, and also serves as the confidence booster you need to keep at it while they find the next lot of recruits (who will be replacing you shortly).
As far as the product itself is concerned, I totally agree: the Kirby is drastically overpriced and I believe that this is for a couple of reasons, the first of which is that, being an American import, the product's price is not suitably adjusted for the South African market. The second is that, even though local agents probably could adjust the price, doing so would lower their own income, instead of allowing them to ride the favourable Rand/Dollar exchange rate.
Despite these issues, it really *is* a fantastic machine. That's not to say I would buy one! They are heavy to carry and awkward to operate unless you have actually been trained and drilled on their use the way the sales guys are. Theoretically, you get free training when you buy the machine, but frankly, who has the time!?
One of Alet's other commenters mentioned that she'd spoken to an allergy specialist, who'd told her that the Kirby does not kill dustmites. As I recall, there has never been any claim made by Kirby that they *kill* dustmites. Rather, the claim is that the machine's far superior sucking action *removes* more dustmites from your surfaces than any other vacuum does, which I believe is quite true.
Basically, even though I suffered through 3 weeks of door to door canvassing for referrals during the day, followed by driving around at my own cost at night to then go and deliver free carpet shampoos to people who'd been hard-sold on having these "demonstrations" in the first place, and I managed only to sell one machine in all this time, I believe that Kirby is a good product. But I have no interest in having one demonstrated to me and I'm certainly not in the market to buy one. At the price, I'd rather buy a Genesis and suffer a bit of hayfever!
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Calling in Some Blogger Love
Howdy once again, folks! Yes, I know, it's been another coupla weeks since my last post. My bad!
But hey! Check this out - see that there snazzy little button sitting in my sidebar? Go on and click that li'l bugger and lessee what happens if you nominate this here li'l Mama for an SA Blog Award, just for the fuck of it, whaddya say?
And on that very optimistic note, let's move along, shall we?
I didn't really have a proper blog post planned when I sat down to write this. I just kind of figured I'd put the ol' button up and see how it goes.
But I'm also way overdue for a blog post and so here we go...
After the birth of my son, James, we were both happy and healthy and we saw no need to bundle ourselves in the car and drive to hospital just to have this confirmed. So we kind of just fell into living life and got on with it.
Several months later, I sit here typing up this post and looking forward to visiting my gynae for the first time since my 38th week of pregnancy. I didn't even bother going for the routine 6-week check up after the birth. I figured I'd know if something was up or out of the ordinary and then I'd schedule an appointment as needed. And so tomorrow I go and see the ole doc to find out why I wake up wanting to vomit every morning and going to bed wanting to vomit every night. And why I'm so very, very, very tired all of the time. And why I'm so sluggish and slow, both in my movements and in my head. And why, despite all of these things and a whole bunch of others that make me think that I have *wragtig* managed to go and get knocked up *again*, in spite of taking very careful precautions and even though there are no less than 4 (that's FOUR) pee sticks that say there ain't nothing going on inside what is fast beginning to resemble a pregnant belleh. And this when I was just starting to fit back into some of my normal clothes again, dammit!
Initially, I wasn't going to say anything about it. Mainly for fear of being lectured to death by my mom about how my body simply can't cope with the strain of another pregnancy so soon, but also a little bit because if there were raised eyebrows when we announced our last pregnancy, then another one is bound to attract some nastiness and stinging remarks. (I'm looking at the in-laws here, and the thinly veiled sarcasm in their comments last time around.) That said, the attention whore in me just couldn't be gagged, so I've more or less already told the entire Twitterverse about my suspicions anyway, so there's really no point trying to keep it a secret. And the long and the short of it is that it is what it is and will be whatever it's going to be and, frankly, I don't give a fuck if you judge me for it.
Mostly, this and being preoccupied with it has taken up much of my capacity to function of late.
So I'm pretty sure there'll be another proper post coming soon. (Read, I'll let you know what the doc says.) Meanwhile, you might have noticed that I've removed the archives from my sidebar. I felt it was getting a bit crowded over there. Also, since I'm in the process of setting up a couple of other blogs (more on that soon), I'm toying with the idea of moving MamaMeeA to WordPress. Thoughts, anyone?
But hey! Check this out - see that there snazzy little button sitting in my sidebar? Go on and click that li'l bugger and lessee what happens if you nominate this here li'l Mama for an SA Blog Award, just for the fuck of it, whaddya say?
And on that very optimistic note, let's move along, shall we?
I didn't really have a proper blog post planned when I sat down to write this. I just kind of figured I'd put the ol' button up and see how it goes.
But I'm also way overdue for a blog post and so here we go...
After the birth of my son, James, we were both happy and healthy and we saw no need to bundle ourselves in the car and drive to hospital just to have this confirmed. So we kind of just fell into living life and got on with it.
Several months later, I sit here typing up this post and looking forward to visiting my gynae for the first time since my 38th week of pregnancy. I didn't even bother going for the routine 6-week check up after the birth. I figured I'd know if something was up or out of the ordinary and then I'd schedule an appointment as needed. And so tomorrow I go and see the ole doc to find out why I wake up wanting to vomit every morning and going to bed wanting to vomit every night. And why I'm so very, very, very tired all of the time. And why I'm so sluggish and slow, both in my movements and in my head. And why, despite all of these things and a whole bunch of others that make me think that I have *wragtig* managed to go and get knocked up *again*, in spite of taking very careful precautions and even though there are no less than 4 (that's FOUR) pee sticks that say there ain't nothing going on inside what is fast beginning to resemble a pregnant belleh. And this when I was just starting to fit back into some of my normal clothes again, dammit!
Initially, I wasn't going to say anything about it. Mainly for fear of being lectured to death by my mom about how my body simply can't cope with the strain of another pregnancy so soon, but also a little bit because if there were raised eyebrows when we announced our last pregnancy, then another one is bound to attract some nastiness and stinging remarks. (I'm looking at the in-laws here, and the thinly veiled sarcasm in their comments last time around.) That said, the attention whore in me just couldn't be gagged, so I've more or less already told the entire Twitterverse about my suspicions anyway, so there's really no point trying to keep it a secret. And the long and the short of it is that it is what it is and will be whatever it's going to be and, frankly, I don't give a fuck if you judge me for it.
Mostly, this and being preoccupied with it has taken up much of my capacity to function of late.
So I'm pretty sure there'll be another proper post coming soon. (Read, I'll let you know what the doc says.) Meanwhile, you might have noticed that I've removed the archives from my sidebar. I felt it was getting a bit crowded over there. Also, since I'm in the process of setting up a couple of other blogs (more on that soon), I'm toying with the idea of moving MamaMeeA to WordPress. Thoughts, anyone?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)