I’ve talked about my day job situation a lot in the past. I’ve got my main day job doing the box office work and that’s the only one with regular hours. Everything else is as-needed status and nobody seems to need me right now.
For babysitting, personal organizing, and substitute teaching; I don’t mind that I don’t work right now. I know that clients for babysitting and personal organizing will come and it’s a situation where I am my own boss and I don’t feel guilty when I’m not working.
And for substitute teaching, I’ve spoken to my boss there about how right now I don’t have the time to work but I wanted to stay on the roster since they aren’t hiring. I’d be scared if I left the roster and then needed the work and couldn’t get my job back. So I’ve been honest and they know my situation. That’s fine with me.
But for my data entry/survey coding job it’s been a different situation. I worked a lot for them at first, but once I started my box office job, I could no longer do graveyard shifts (or I could, but I found out that my body does require sleep so I don’t want to do them). And while I thought at first I could do the work from home in between my customers for the box office job, I never knew what to list as my availability. I didn’t want to say that I was available the entire time because they might assign me a job that takes 5 hours when I only have 3 hours in chunks.
And because my availability was so limited, the company wasn’t using me for work. In the past few months, I worked about 2 or 3 hours for them. And while some money is better than no money, I felt like I was leading the company on.
So yesterday, I sent an email to my 2 bosses at that job. I explained my situation and gave them the two options that seemed right to me. Either they could keep me on as an employee and understand that I have extremely limited availability and perhaps one day that would change and they could use me again. Or we could end our work relationship.
I don’t want to quit, but at the same time I felt so guilty about not being honest to my bosses about my situation. I don’t want to quit, but I would understand if they didn’t want to keep someone on staff who couldn’t work as much as they would like.
I heard back from one of my bosses within an hour of sending the email. She thanked me for my honesty and decided that she’d like to keep me on in case my schedule changes and I become more available for her.
I’m so grateful that that is what her decision was. It was exactly what I was hoping for by sending that email. I haven’t heard back from my other boss, but he is the one who runs the graveyard shifts and technically I’m only on that schedule as a backup (my main job is the work from home part).
I still need to find something else to do, but at least some of my guilt that was associated with this job is gone. And hopefully with less guilt, I will be able to focus more on finding the perfect job to fit into my schedule.
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