Category Archives: Work

Being A Business (or Making Things Official)

Posted on September 29, 2016 | 1 comment

I’ve been running this blog for a pretty decent amount of time so far. I’ve gotten packages delivered to my house with my address and the name as “Finding My Inner Bombshell” with no issues. I haven’t made any money on this blog so I haven’t had any issues with checks coming in with the blog name. But I’ve known for a while that it would be smart to create a fictitious business name for the blog, I just never got around to it.

I also started a production company a while ago. I really haven’t done much with it, but it will be listed as one of the production companies for “Single Parent Date Night”. I had another project in mind for my production company, but it fell apart when another project with the same concept came out and had a lot of positive press. But many people produce their own work so having my own production company is a good thing for me. Again, I haven’t made money in my production company name, but I figured creating a fictitious business name would be a smart thing to do.

A few weeks ago, I found out that with one of my day jobs they will not be able to pay us as individuals anymore. It’s a long story, but basically we all needed to have a business that they could pay us through. We had the option to create a sole proprietor or a LLC, and after doing research (and realizing how expensive a LLC would be each year), I decided it was time to make both the blog and my production company official.

Fortunately, there is so much stuff online about how to create a DBA and it’s not a horrible process to have to go through. I had to submit some paperwork to make sure that neither the blog nor the production company names were taken already (neither were but I had a moment of wondering if I had screwed up for not doing it sooner). Then there was some paperwork to fill out online and I got a bar code to bring with me to the county courthouse to pay and complete.

The county courthouse was a pretty easy step and I was prepared with all my paperwork and money (possibly over prepared because I did more forms that was required) and I was out of there quickly. Another step I had to do is to get my DBA announcements into a newspaper for 4 weeks. Fortunately the county website lists dozens of eligible newspapers and their prices so I went with one of the cheapest ones (that actually price matched so it became the cheapest one) and my announcements will be in the paper soon.

This is all very professional and official, but because it was so easy for me it’s a bit hard to believe that I’ve officially created 2 businesses for myself. I’ll be setting up a business banking account in the next few weeks (I need that for the day job) with my DBA names on it so I can start being paid as my blog or production company if I ever make money off of either.

This was a step I had to do to keep my day job, but I’m glad I was forced into doing this. I needed to do it eventually and I didn’t have a good reason to do it so I was procrastinating. But it was really a simple process and it’s pretty much all down so I’m officially a business owner now of 2 different businesses! I think that’s pretty exciting!

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Day Job News (or Things Are Getting Better)

Posted on September 8, 2016 | Comments Off on Day Job News (or Things Are Getting Better)

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about my day jobs. For the most part, things are the same as always. I’m still working my box office job plus my data entry/calendar management job from home. I’m also working for my old boss time to time with in person box office work and I still babysit on occasional weekends. My hours each week range from 43 to 68 hours in a week depending on how many hours I work my occasional jobs, but even at the lowest number a week I’m finally making a more livable income.

What I’m making isn’t making it easy to pay off my credit card debt. I was recently able to pay off about 5% of what my remaining debt is, but that’s less than I was hoping. I really felt like I’d have it paid off by now, but I think it’s going to be a bit more time before it’s gone. But each of the jobs I work adds to my income and adds to what I can pay off each month so I’m grateful for each work hour I get.

But while I’m not making as much money as I would love to make, I’ve gotten some pretty awesome news with all of my jobs in the past few weeks. It started with my occasional box office job. I’m going to have the opportunity to have more shifts in a month now. There needs to be some coverage for the box office at other shows than the ones I typically work, so I’ll get a couple of extra shifts. Each of the extra shifts will only be 2 hours, but I might be able to get 3 of those in a month. 6 extra hours isn’t a lot, but that money will pay off one or two utilities bills at a time so it adds up!

I also got some good news about my work from home box office job. A few weeks ago I got an email from the owner of the company asking me to call him. My first thought was that I was fired (even though there was no reason I should be fired) so I called him back immediately. The stuff he needed to talk to me about was only about how our pay system works (he needed some information from me that he didn’t have) so I didn’t have to worry about anything. And during that call, he asked me if I was having any issues with the job that he should know about.

I told him that while I love working this job, it’s not giving me all the flexibility I was expecting when I took the job. Since I don’t get scheduled for full shifts each day, I have the potential to work an extra 2 hours each weekday if I had to make up hours. I’ve made up hours in the past when I go out-of-town or have a doctor’s appointment in the middle of the day. It’s never been too big of a deal, but I’ve always had to go through both my boss and manager.

Fortunately, the owner agreed with me that flexibility should be fine since I do have those hours each week that I usually don’t work that can be used as make-up hours. I just have to go through my manager (which is easier since we are both on chat together every work day) and I can make up the hours based on when we feel it would be best. Now I have the flexibility for auditions that I’ve been needing and hopefully as I get more auditions this arrangement will continue to work for us all.

The last day job I got great news about was my data entry/calendar management one. When I was hired, it was just under a 2 year contract. The end of that contract is coming up at the end of this month and I’ve been stressing a bit about if that contract wasn’t going to be extended. That job is over half of my income each month, so I need that money. I just got the email this week that my contract is going to be extended for at least another year! The budget is still being worked out so the number of hours each week may change (I don’t know if that would go up or down), but as long as I’m still working that job at least I know I’ll have some more regular income coming in.

But since I was so worried about that job not getting an extension on the contract, I’ve been spending time over the past month looking for another job that I could do. I focused mainly on jobs that I could do along with the jobs I already have, but I was also open to finding a full-time job that had the flexibility I need. There really aren’t a ton of full-time jobs with flexibility (more people who have those either start as part-time or start with no flexibility), but then I was listening to a podcast that had an interview with a woman who owns a virtual assistant company.

In the past, I’ve tried to get jobs as a virtual assistant. But so many of those companies require you to use a PC and I have a Mac. I didn’t want to have to buy a different computer just to work a job with, so I never applied to them. But when I found out that the company that was interviewed loves people who have Macs, I applied immediately! Because of my schedule and when they could do Skype interviews it took a bit of time before I could interview for the company, but I finally had my interview this week and it went really well! The next step is to wait to see if they have a client that needs a virtual assistant that matches my skill set. And things tend to start at 5 hours a week, which I feel pretty confident that I could do.

Eventually, the virtual assistant job can be more hours (and you can take on more than one client), so over time it may become one of my main day jobs. I’m not thinking that far in advance right now, but it doesn’t hurt to have some potential plans in mind when I’m looking at new day jobs. Of course, I hope that sooner rather than later a day job won’t be necessary as I will hopefully make all my income with acting. But I also have to be realistic.

Considering that not long ago I was completely out of work and feeling hopeless with my day job situation, I’m pretty happy with how things are going right now. They can always be better, but I think the path I’m on is one of the better ones that I’ve had lately. I’m finally feeling some stability, I can make some plans for purchases I’d like to make, and I’m making steps on my debt reduction. I can’t ask for that much more than that.

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Posted in Tough Stuff, Work

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Staying Super Busy (or Another Job)

Posted on June 10, 2016 | 1 comment

I’ve been super busy with work lately. I’ve got my regular box office job which hasn’t really changed since I started there almost 2 years ago. But because I will be out-of-town for a weekend in July, I’ve been working extra hours to make up what I will be missing (that way my pay doesn’t get docked). I’ve been so grateful for that job since I got it, even though it doesn’t have the most flexible hours. I’ve also been busy with my data entry job. I actually just got some more hours with that job and a new process that I’ve been helping with. It’s nice to have variety with that job since it can feel very repetitive researching events and entering them into the system.

Between those two jobs, I’m working 43 hours a week (not counting the extra hours I’m working now with the box office job to make up for July hours). I’ve also got my random box office job on occasional weekends and babysitting. So in a single week, I can easily be closer to 60 hours in a week. It’s great, because I do need the money and I know that I’m so lucky to have any work right now. But of course, I had to add another gig in as well.

I’m now working very part-time (4 hours a week) for a friend of mine doing some assistant/producer work. It’s not hard work, but since she is so busy she doesn’t have the time to do it. Again, the extra money is nice and I know that this can lead to more work so I’m super grateful for it. Plus, working for a friend is pretty fun and I know that we work well together. This job is only going to be for the next 6 weeks, but any extra work is helpful in getting my bills paid and saving up for my new computer (which sadly doesn’t look like it will be released until the winter). Since I know it can lead to more work, I’m totally fine with temporary work. Technically my data entry job was temporary since I was only going to be able to have a 2 year contract, but now I’ve got more hours than ever and it looks like I might get that 3rd year contract. So if I have to start at 4 hours a week to end up with a regular gig, I’m fine with that.

Only my box office jobs and babysitting have set hours. Everything else is on my own schedule and I don’t want to seem like I’m slacking because I set my own hours and there are no quotas I have to reach each day. With my data entry job, I think I’ve got a great line of communication with my boss and she’s been telling me how everyone has been happy with my work. And I doubt I’d be getting additional hours and possibly a contract extension if they didn’t think I was meeting or exceeding what they expected of me. And since the other job is with a friend, I know she’ll call me out if she isn’t happy with things and we have already had multiple texts back and forth just making sure we are on the same page with everything.

With all these jobs, I’m getting tougher on myself with my time management. I used to think that time management was one of my strong points, but as my time as gotten more crazy and less structured I’ve realized how much more work I’ve had to put into planning things out. I’m a little OCD with things (I’ve always been like that with organization) so my calendar is color-coded and I’m using the alerts and reminder apps a lot so I remember to send invoices or other work related tasks that are time sensitive. I’m still trying to figure out the best way to view my schedule because I love the monthly view on the calendar app on my computer, but some days I have so many things scheduled that I cannot view all my plans unless I go into weekly or daily view (I’d love any tips from other people with this issue on what works!).

Besides all my jobs, I also have my career (acting) and my writing (both on here and where I freelance) to schedule so I’ve been focusing on making sure I meet all my deadlines for those too. So far, I haven’t run into issues, but I’ve seen where issues could have happened so I’m working on setting myself up so those issues don’t ever become an issue.

I know that most people work just as crazy or crazier hours than I do. A lot of people work 60-70 hours a week every week. I’m lucky that when I have a 60 hour week or have to work 3 jobs in 1 day that those are rarities and not the norm. I probably keep taking on all of these jobs because I’m finally getting to a better place financially and I remember when I wasn’t working or working enough and how much of a struggle everything was. I don’t want to get to that place again and the best way to stay employed is to have as many jobs as I can. I know that jobs can go without warning and I really want to be as prepared for that possibility as possible.

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Missing Out On Some Fun (or Flexible Time Management)

Posted on May 12, 2016 | Comments Off on Missing Out On Some Fun (or Flexible Time Management)

This week has been a pretty crazy busy week for me. I’ve been very busy with the day jobs, including learning how to do a new task for my research job. I now have 4 extra hours a week plus a new aspect of my job that takes up 50% of my hours. I’ve done some phone training, but we’ve also had a bunch of technical issues and it’s required so many phone calls and emails back and forth (I’m so grateful that my boss is chill about all this).

I’m very happy to have the new tasks and the additional hours because the extra money helps and I want to make sure that this day job continues beyond when my contract ends in October. But learning new things and trying to balance the hours split between the two jobs for one job has been a bit much. I’m finally starting to get into a good groove with the new work and things are much more normal, but that definitely affected the beginning of my week.

And the beginning of this week was supposed to be pretty packed with social events. But because of the stress I was dealing with from the job, I had to make the decision not to go to them.

I’m not too happy about missing the events. Both of them were actor events. And I know I’m been slacking a bit with my acting career lately. I need to make more of an effort to make my career a priority. But that’s not easy when the money-making jobs need to happen too. I thought I had figured out a good balance, but all the technical issues really made me have to reorganize my time and figure out what things had to be sacrificed. And sadly, the free acting related things had to be sacrificed over the money-making jobs.

Time management isn’t usually my weakness, but I’ve realized that flexible time management is. I get my schedule set for the week (or day), but I don’t allow for issues to come up. I have to get from one thing to another really quickly at times, and if there is a delay it can affect multiple things at once. The delay isn’t usually traffic (I typically give myself double the time I’m expecting it to take to get somewhere), but something in my life that stops me in my tracks and requires my attention before I can move on. Sometimes, these things aren’t avoidable like health issues (panic or gallbladder attacks can easily ruin an entire day). But I need to be aware of other issues that might need extra time and to build that into my day at some point.

I am glad I stayed home to work on the things I had to do, but I can’t help but feel that there may have been another way for me to deal with them and still make it to the events that I want to go to. I’ve been looking at my upcoming calendar and the fun events I have planned. I want to make sure that I can add in some flexible time in there to help make sure that I can do whatever needs to be done without missing out on the events.

I think the reason why this has never really been an issue for me before is that I’ve never been as busy as I’ve been lately. I miss the days where I only had 1 day job and that was it. It was super easy to schedule around that because my hours were pretty set and nothing would change. While my box office job hours don’t change (unless they need me to cover for someone or I have to make up hours), my research hours can be at any time. I try to do them around the same time as the box office job, but sometimes they have to be done late at night. I try to keep things as stable as possible, but life happens and since my job isn’t restricted to certain hours I can’t say that if I miss work at a certain time that I get to skip it. I have to find the time to make it up.

I can’t go back in time to fix the scheduling issues so that I could attend the events that I wanted to go to. All I can do is learn from the mistakes that I made (or the issues that I experienced) and try to make things better for me for the future. Hopefully, I can find a great way to balance out life and work and I can make acting events a priority in my life again.

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Back To Normal (or Catching Up On Life)

Posted on April 15, 2016 | Comments Off on Back To Normal (or Catching Up On Life)

Even though I was only gone to Santa Barbara for a couple of days, when I got back to LA it felt like I had been gone for a lot longer. I’ve done other weekend getaways before, but for some reason it felt like this one was different. I’m glad I was out-of-town as long as I was (I had time to relax and see my family), but I’m also happy to be home.

The first thing I had to catch up on was work. I did miss work on Saturday last week (which was fine because I had worked extra hours not too long ago to cover for a co-worker), so I had to see what had happened while I was gone and if there was anything weird that I needed to know about. I ended up logging into my work email on a day off to see what went on while I wasn’t working and I looked at some of the issues that my co-workers had to make sure I was ready for any customers with the same issues. It didn’t take too long, but since my brain was in vacation mode a bit it seemed to take longer.

Also, in my other day job, I’m getting more hours soon. I can’t start the new hours until I have some training (and they might have to set me up with some work computer stuff), but since I know that it’s coming up I want to make sure I’m prepared. I’m trying to do as much as I can now with my current responsibilities because I know that when I get my extra hours my time needs to be split between my current work and the new work that I’m being trained on. I need to figure out a good time management system to split up my hours and I’m trying to look at that now before I have the extra responsibility to deal with.

I’ve also been busy working on the short film my friend wrote for us to star in. We have our director and our director got us a great producer. We’ve had a couple of phone meetings to work on budget and other things and we are all hopeful that things will be ready to go at the end of May when we are hoping to shoot. Even though I’ve produced a documentary before, working on a narrative (scripted) film is very different and there are things to think about that I didn’t have to worry about with the documentary. Fortunately, everyone else is much more experienced than I am so they can help guide me to what I need to help with. It’s a little overwhelming, but I’m so excited to be working on this project and seeing what ends up happening with it after it is done.

Besides all of that work plus the usual stuff that I have to do every week (errands can get annoying and time-consuming!), I’ve been running around like crazy and I’m finally starting to feel caught up on life. I have some really fun adventures coming up over the next few weeks and I don’t want to have to stress about not having a ton of free time to catch up on other things. It seems like I have weeks where everything is overbooked and crazy and then weeks where I’ve got nothing to do. I wish the weeks would be a bit more mixed up, but I’m dealing with the craziness (and lack of sleep) just fine for now and I know soon enough I’ll be wishing I had more stuff to do.

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Posted in Acting, Fun Stuff, Tough Stuff, Work

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Tax Time (or Happy To Owe The Government Some Money)

Posted on March 8, 2016 | 1 comment

I just had my taxes done last week and it was a totally different experience than I’ve ever had. So I wanted to share it with all of you in case you are still looking for a tax preparer.

In the past, I’ve always had my parents’ accountant do my taxes. When I lived at home (when I was working in high school), my parents just brought him what I made and to be honest I have no idea if I ever owed anything. Those jobs were pretty part-time and if I did owe something, maybe my parents helped me out. Once I moved to LA, I got a tax preparation packet from the accountant in the beginning of each year. I’d fill it out, make a list of my deductions, and stick all of that plus my W2 and 1099 forms in an envelope and mailed it to my parents. They brought it in for me and everything was done. I’d get a letter in the mail a few weeks later either saying how much I owed or how much I’d get back.

It was fine, but I realized last year that I needed to be a much more active participant in my taxes. 2015 was the first year that all of my income was 1099. And while I did pay estimated taxes (although I’d learn not enough so I still had a penalty), I knew I’d owe more money. I was prepared to owe money and had been saving about 1/3 of every paycheck I got. But I was still worried that it wasn’t enough.

So many of my actor friends recommended going to Chuck Sloan and Associates for taxes, so I made an appointment there. They are cheapest if you go in January or February (although they are always pretty affordable), so I made my appointment for the last day of February. Even before my appointment, I became a fan of the office. I had to change my appointment time a couple of times due to conflicts that came up, and they never seemed annoyed or bothered by that. They just gave me a new time and seemed happy that I’d be coming in.

Since I work from home, I wasn’t sure what the rush hour situation would be like on the freeway (the office is in the valley). I gave myself a little over an hour to get there, but made it in 20 minutes! So I sat in my car and listened to podcasts while I waiting for my appointment time.

Chuck Sloan

I was assigned Daphne as my tax preparer. And even though I know I was assigned to her randomly, I felt like it was fate that she was helping me. She totally got how nervous I was about everything and we chatted a bit about our mutual love of podcasts before getting down to business.

I had explained to Daphne that while I had saved money and paid estimated taxes that I was so worried that I would still owe more than I could afford. So instead of doing everything at once, she entered all of my income, unemployment information, and health insurance information to show me the absolute worst case scenario I could be in.

And even that was less than what I had saved!

I was so happy that I wouldn’t have to figure out where to get extra money to pay my taxes that I burst into tears. I was crying out of relief from the stress I had felt from the past year and from the joy knowing that the first time I tried to be more involved in my taxes that I did do something right.

Daphne was happy to explain all the deductions that she entered for me. I was terrified to put down a home office because I’ve heard that is often a red flag for the IRS. I do work my jobs from home, so it is totally reasonable for me to put down a home office on my taxes. It still makes me a bit nervous that I did that, but Daphne reassured me that when you work as a virtual employee (like I do), it’s expected to have a home office on your taxes.

After everything was entered, explained, and double checked; Daphne showed me my total tax bill. And it ended up being less than half of what I had set aside to pay my taxes! While I wish that I was getting a refund or owing even less than that, anything less than what I had saved is awesome! I don’t have to worry about borrowing money or figuring out a payment plan with the IRS. I just sent in my checks and it’s done.

I really cannot thank Daphne and the rest of the employees at Chuck Sloan and Associates enough. They worked together as a team to make sure that I was getting all the deductions that I deserved and that everything was perfect before it was sent it. They dealt with my craziness, my stress, and my tears without looking at me weird. And they made me excited to get my taxes done! I doubt most people could say that.

When Daphne was working with me on my taxes we went over a couple of ideas of how I could organize things better for 2016, and I’m working on implementing those now. It mainly has to do with organizing things by type and not by month since the IRS doesn’t care about when things were purchased or paid for, just what category all of that money goes into.

I know that I’ll be going back to Daphne next year for my taxes since she was the first financial type person I’ve worked with who didn’t look down on me for how little money I had, got the weird things I spend my money on for work, and totally got my organizational system. And having someone like that on my team is invaluable for me.

Taxes By Daphne

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Posted in Acting, Fun Stuff, Saving, Tough Stuff, Work

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Getting Out Of A Funk (or A Phone Call Can Change My Mood)

Posted on January 22, 2016 | 2 comments

I’ll admit that I’ve been in a bit of a bad mood the past few days. It’s never fun being in a bad mood, but it’s been tough to escape.

First of all, I’ve been dealing with some health issues. I’ve had gallbladder issues for a while. I have a family history of gallstones and people getting their gallbladder out. I’ve had gallstones for a while and have been told that I should get my gallbladder out eventually, but I haven’t done it yet. My attacks haven’t been frequent enough to significantly bother me and I really don’t want to undergo a surgery. I used to have attacks once a month or so, but I haven’t had an attack in a while.

Then I had one. And while it was awful, I just figured that it happened and I would get another one soon. Then I got another. And another. I’ve had 3 gallbladder attacks this month. I know I should probably go to the doctor to check things out, but these attacks are not as bad as some in the past. All of them have lasted under 10 minutes (compared to hours with them in the past), so I’m hoping that maybe it was just bad luck that I got them back to back.

I’ve also had a bit of a depression regarding paying my taxes this year. 2015 was the first year that all of my income was 1099. I knew that I had to save for my taxes and I did save about 30% of what I made. I also kept track of all of my receipts and mileage and I think I did some amazing record keeping. I’m seeing a new tax preparer this year who specialized in entertainment industry taxes at the end of February and I’m hoping that I have saved enough money to pay everything I owe. Once I know that, my stress level will go down significantly. But until that appointment, it will be a bit of a dark cloud over my head.

And finally, I’m just stressed about work and scheduling. I’ve got a lot coming up and so many of my weekends are jam-packed already. I know that I can get through it, but I have to get through it.

But yesterday, I got some good news about the film festival I work for. I can’t share anything yet, but there may be some very exciting things with the festival coming up soon. Even though nothing is definite (and it won’t necessarily happen any time soon), knowing that it’s a possibility really improved my mood and gave me a nice positive boost in my life. I need to be reminded why I’m working my butt off so hard sometimes. It can be frustrating when all it seems I do are day jobs and I don’t do anything toward my career. And while the film festival isn’t necessarily the career path I’m on, it’s something I love and something that makes me happy. If I spend the rest of my life running the film festival and then auditioning when I can, I would be ecstatic. The festival doesn’t feel like a job to me. Hopefully, in the future the film festival will be my day job but that will take a lot of work and a lot of other factors that I don’t control. But it can be nice to dream.

I’m glad that while my week wasn’t so great, I’m ending it on a good note and am going into the weekend feeling much better about my situation than I have in a while. It’s a good reminder that when you feel like things aren’t going your way, one little thing is all it takes to change that around.

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Trying To Go With The Flow (or Staying Calm And Remembering To Breathe)

Posted on September 25, 2015 | 1 comment

I hate when I have a bad day. Obviously, everyone hates bad days, but I feel like my bad days take it to an epic new level. And when that happens, I get sucked into how bad it is and feel like I can’t dig out of the hole of awfulness.

This past Tuesday was one of those epically bad days. It didn’t start off too bad. Work got off to a good start, but then it just took a direct downhill turn. The majority of my shift I felt pretty horrible and really debated if I want to stay at my job anymore or if it’s time for me to move on. To be honest, I’m still debating this issue. I don’t really get time off at my job and when I have taken time off it’s made me feel guilty because my co-workers have to cover my share of the work. There are more and more things and opportunities that I’d love to do, but they happen during my work time. I have no intention of leaving my job anytime soon, but I’m also not going to ignore options that come my way.

The worst part of my work shift that day was the last customer I had to work with. It wasn’t the customer’s fault at all. They needed a confirmation resent to them, but it didn’t appear that the type of order they placed could have been done. I got this customer the last minute of my shift and I ended up working 30 minutes after closing trying to figure out their situation. One of my co-workers stayed on too and was a huge help, but we still had to manually search through every city that our show runs in and never found their order (it ended up being an error on the location’s side so there was no way we could have helped the customer).

After working 30 minutes late, I was late for my next thing which was a meeting with my therapist. It was a pretty standard check in appointment and we’ve decided to continue on the dosage of Vyvanse that I’m currently on. He re-wrote my prescription and I was on my way.

Once I got to the hospital to get my refill, I found out that my doctor forgot to write today’s date on the refill order (since it’s a controlled medication, I need to have a handwritten refill request every time). I wish I could have just gone outside and added the date or shown them the bill from seeing my therapist, but they needed an entirely new refill request.

Of course, because of traffic, there was no way I could drive all the way back to my therapist to get another form. So I called and asked if one could be ready for me to pick up another time. I did manage to go at 7am yesterday and got the new form, but now they are out of the medication at the hospital and it will take at least 4 days before I can get my medication (I’ll run out before then).

After that day, I was ready to just sit and home and be in a funk. And that’s exactly what I did. I felt like nothing was going to go right with my day so I didn’t want to bother. And fortunately, I didn’t have anything else that was urgent to do that day, so I could indulge in my bad mood.

I’m lucky that it seems like these epically bad days only last one day (except for the fact that yesterday they ran out of my prescription at the hospital and I can’t get it refilled for a few days). I’m totally in a better mood now. I wish that I could control how I deal with bad days better, but I don’t think that I handle them horribly. I just want to be able to get out of the funk prior to going to bed for the night.

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Busy Busy Busy (or Triple Job Day)

Posted on September 4, 2015 | 1 comment

Most of the time, I have a pretty low-key situation with my job (or jobs). With my two main jobs, I can pretty much work them at the same time. I do my data entry between my customers at the box office job. It’s not always easy to juggle it, but I make it work.

Then of course there are the days that my box office job is insanely busy and I have no time for the data entry job. I then either have to not work the data entry job that day (not a big deal since I can only work that job 12 hours a week) or I have to work after my box office job is done for the day. It’s not a horrible situation and I still consider myself so lucky that I’ve found these two jobs (and the combined money between the two of them is almost enough to pay my bills!).

I’m trying not to get overwhelmed on the days that it’s super busy, but lately I’ve struggled with that. The combination of a lot of customers, lots of either repetitive questions or questions I can’t help with, and the heat have made me cranky and I don’t want my customers to know about that. I keep videos of puppies playing up on YouTube in the background to watch when I need to calm down.

The other day, I was asked by my old boss to help him at his job. I’ve done phone calls for him as well as some day-of box office work. But this time he needed me to help him stuff envelopes.

I wasn’t really looking forward to it. I knew I’d be working my 2 jobs earlier in the day and it was hot (and that office has no a/c), but I needed the extra money. So after working a double day, I drove over to Venice to work my 3rd job of the day.

At first, it was a bit annoying doing the work. It’s busy work and very repetitive. But then I decided to get my phone and headphones out and listen to some podcasts while I worked. Between the podcast entertainment and the repetitive action of stuffing envelopes I started to relax and calm down. I had to pay attention to what I was doing because each envelope had a different paper that needed to go inside, but it was still a job that I was able to just focus on what I had to do and let the rest of my mind drift.

After working those 3 hours, I felt so much calmer than I did before. It’s not something that I’d want to do every day, but stuffing those envelopes that day was really the perfect thing for me to do. It’s nice that while I wasn’t looking forward to the job before I got there, it was exactly what I needed in my day (plus, the extra money doesn’t hurt!).

I’ve been trying to find ways to separate my mind from work when the work day is done. I thought that I had it worked out well, but I’ve now realized that it’s not totally what I need. When I go to work out, that’s a perfect separation of when it’s work time and when it’s fun time. And on the other days I try to do some sort of errand (even if it’s just going to the store or post office) as soon as my box office shift is done to help my mind realize that work is over (if I stay at my computer I wouldn’t feel like it’s done). I’ve realized now that just going to the store after work might not be enough to create separation for me. I need to work on figuring out what would work best for me. Workouts work well, but I’m not sure if I can work out every day.

If any of you work from home, I’d really appreciate your suggestions on how to separate work life from regular life!

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Work Work Work (or Another Very Part Time Job)

Posted on July 29, 2015 | Comments Off on Work Work Work (or Another Very Part Time Job)

I’ve been pretty stable with my work lately. I’ve got my box office job and my research job. While I’m almost making enough money, I haven’t wanted to find anything else that is regular hours because I’m scared of getting burnt out.

I had worked very briefly for my old boss (sadly, that gig didn’t work out due to timing and resources). That job wasn’t going to be more than the time I was there so I wasn’t expecting too much. Then he called me to help with a one time gig doing some concession sales at a screening.

After working the concessions, he asked if I’d be down to work some box office hours for him at future screenings. I said sure because during the screenings I can just sit in the lobby and read (and get paid for it). And this past Sunday was my first shift.

I had some work to do prior to the shift like getting the box office materials from my boss and making a Costco run to pick up things for the concession stand. But even with the prep work, I was still so nervous when I got to the theater on Sunday. I was in charge of the box office, and even though I had some student workers helping me there, I really felt thrown in. I didn’t pay attention to what was happening the last time I was there because I was so busy selling concessions. So I tried to stay positive and know that the student workers would be there to support me and not try to make me fail.

The shift went pretty well. I had a couple of minor issues to deal with and one pretty big one, but I think that most of the guests there felt like it ran smoothly. And the student workers helping me were really amazing and understood how frazzled I felt and really tried hard to make things easy on me (or show me where things were supposed to go if I put them in the wrong place).

And it was pretty easy during the screening. I enjoyed reading my book and while I was working for 6 hours, I really only “worked” for about 2.5 hours. I was pretty nervous during the screening that someone would come rushing out and be very upset about something, but beyond some people asking if we could turn down the air conditioning there were no complaints.

I’ll be working at another screening this coming weekend and I’ve got a couple of other screenings booked over the next few months. This won’t be something that will make me a ton of money, but any extra money is good money to me right now!

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