Trumped!

There's nothing worse than reading a long, boring, repetitive, negative rant about things that don't concern you. So, I'll make this short.

In my boring, every-day life (the part of life in which we have to work in order to earn an income and in which many of us are doing something that we're not entirely passionate about), I am a translator and proofreader. I randomly got into this through my previous, short-lived, but semi-successful, acting career (oh, who am I kidding, I should have stopped the descriptives after short-lived). Because I did voices for a few video games, I ended up with a connection to a video game company, which hired me to do a translation or two and presto... five years later, I'm a translator, specializing in video games for the US and UK markets.

I'm perfectly happy with this line of work. It gives me the freedom to work from home, allows me to have free time, with brief busy spurts, and basically gives me enough work to get by. In this case, it's definitely quality time winning out over massive amounts of cashola, but I'm ok with that... generally. Recently, I've had a very busy rush, which has led to the current near-dry spell (definitely worrisome). Worse than the dry spell, though, is the fact that I haven't been paid by my biggest clients in over three months. I've already mentioned this in a previous post (The Horror, The Horror), so you'll understand why the issue has single-handedly outdone itself.

It's a testament to how well I'm doing overall in my life that this lack of money hasn't destroyed me utterly. Le Husband and I have gotten by (with the help of credit cards) on his meagre artist's earnings and I have managed to not think about it every minute of every day, which is no small feat, considering what a worrier I tend to be. It occurred to me very early on that, other than the obvious (phone calls, emails), there was very little that I could do from all the way over here in the US of A and that it was not worth freaking out over. How easy it is, n'est-pas, to melt into a messy, dribbling pile of self-pitying tears rather than face the bothersome thing and move on?

All of this was well and good, of course, until the day on which payment had been promised and repromised (yesterday) came and went... without payment. Add to that this past weekend's cold snap with no heat in our home and you get... well, a morning of messy, dribbling, self-pitying... you get the picture!

I'm not a control freak (although I can easily become one if the situation warrants it... say, Christmas caroling with my friends in high school, trying to keep them from getting run over or cleaning house with Le Husband, whose standards are, in my opinion, sub-par), but I like to have a firm handle on what happens to me. Barring a random car accident or other inevitable bump with fate, I like to think that I'm the Mistress Of My Own Destiny. But, this morning, it became very apparent that, not only do others control our lives, but those others are sometimes the little guys; the power-hungry accountants who would rather put an invoice through the shredder in their last week with a company than deal with it themselves... or the bored utilities worker who prefers to tell clients that the morning's scheduled appointment will actually be in the afternoon, just to make their own lives easier.

I've been on both sides of these equations. I worked for a big French company, where the measly little accountants did their best to make themselves feel better by controlling others, including clients, suppliers, co-workers and anyone else who had the misfortune of requiring their services. But, in that situation, I was able to at least go see them and flirt, cajole, needle, harass, anything to get them to make payments for me. After making a couple irate phone calls this morning, I was able to get a positive response from the gas company and am happy to say that the heat is on. In that case, I was the client and, in the US at least, the client is king. But my phone call to the new accountant in charge of paying my invoices with the video game company (the shredder-fiend has left the company leaving, I understand, many disgruntled people in his wake) ended on a slightly more bitter note: I'm being put off another week.

Oh well, at least I've lost some weight!