Where's the Nearest Fire Extinguisher?
Like many a freelance writer, Kami L. Rice is based somewhere (Nashville) but lives life everywhere and tweets @KamiTheWriter.
This afternoon I rushed into the small film production office somewhat late even though the gig’s short hours are very flexible. Currently this particular gig involves mailing out daily orders (calling it “fulfillment” makes it sound more impressive), and the Fed-Ex man who dictates my afternoon deadline was due in about 15 minutes.
“Sorry I’m late,” I explained as I stepped inside. “I was putting out fires.”
“How do you have fires to put out? You’re a writer,” Ian, the production manager guy, quipped a little seriously.
(If I hadn’t been so absorbed with my fires, I might have managed to come up with some pithy reply to his question, as it’s begging for any number of pithy replies: I was burning notes from the sources I promised not to out to the Feds. I was finishing a profile on a local fireman. I was inspired by heaven to write a poem and came up with this great fire metaphor about laundry. Maybe it’s okay that I was absorbed by my fires.)
Grant, a producer type who’s borrowing office space, stood up for me, noting that I’m important enough to have fires to put out. Thanks, Grant. I think.
Anyway, it was all in friendliness, and it provided some welcome relief from the heat, but I was glad when Ian asked the next question--“What are the fires?”—because I needed to talk about them.
You see, as most of us might agree, freelancing can be one of the best kinds of life. I love my schedule. I love the entrepreneurial aspect of my work. I love creating and learning and days that are never the same. I love meeting strangers. I even mostly like being a businesswoman.
Another of my favorite things about freelancing is that I get to belong to everyone and to no one all at once. With many of my most regular clients, I’m part of the family enough to hear all the internal goings-on, to be a confidante, to be welcomed with open arms. But I’m not a part of the family enough to be at the mercy of the unhealthiness that is always lurking even in the best of companies.
However, today’s fires reminded me of the negative side of that mostly positive in-but-not-of-the-family thing. A publication I write for has changed ownership, and I’m pretty sure it’s been messy. However, I’m just a contractor. I’m not in the office. No one’s sending me memos. My guesses about the politics raging between old and new people are only assumptions that don’t offer any credible map for navigating the new state of things. And because of that lack of knowledge, one little emailed question from me created a fire. It wasn’t my fire, really, but I apparently added a big unintentional log to something that was already smoldering. Its flame flared up in my face and I had to find some water. Quick.
This fire then viscerally pointed out the negative side of another mostly positive aspect of freelancing: you’re your own boss and your own co-workers. But that means there are no fellow firefighters to help you strategize about how to attack a particular fire. Fortunately, this time, I remembered an appropriate contact from the Rolodex in my head and got the sounding board help I needed. But sometimes the Rolodex comes up empty, and I’m left calling my mom because at least she’ll listen as I ramble through my options.
The moral of the story is that the next time some burned-out cubicle worker looks over longingly at my glamorously romantic, freewheeling, no-boundaries freelance life, I’ll salve her wounds with stories of the time I, too, was singed by a firestorm. The next time some regular-paycheck-receiving, paid-vacation-earning, health-insurance-policy-holding production manager looks down his nose at my not-a-real-job profession, I’ll hold my head high and tell him that I, too, have fires to put out.
