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Table of Contents

Psst – wanna work for yourself?

Copyright 2008 Anthony P. Lawrence

If I have to work for an idiot, I might as well work for myself- Tony Lawrence

There are about ten million self employed people in the U.S.A. (see http://www.bls.gov/cps/ to find details like that). If you bought this e-book, chances are you want to be one of them (or maybe you already are).

The numbers of the self employed have been growing. I'm sure several factors are at work here. One is simply that the job market is getting tougher and employers are more abusive than they have been in better times. It may also be that the large "baby boomer" generation has more belief in self empowerment than those a little bit older. Believing that you are in control of your own fate would seem to quite naturally increase a desire for self employment.

Why would you want to work for yourself? That's the theme for the first section of this book: why you would, why you wouldn't, what you need to do before you start your business.

Dreams of self employment

The word "dream" often comes up when people talk about self employment. According to one source, 44% of 2500 unemployed people said they they considered starting their own businesses.

Yet only about 4% actually did.

Certainly for some folks the "dream" is just that; an idle fantasy. Those folks probably don't even flesh out the fantasy very much: it's just a vague picture of freedom from whatever enslaves them now. Maybe a few details about what they'd actually be doing, but usually even that's pretty vague. They may be serious about not liking their job, but that's as far as it goes.

Considering all the real and imagined problems that starting your own business can involve (more imagined than real, but most don't know that), that 4% figure is actually pretty good. Those are the 4% that paid no attention to self doubt, ignored the bemused expressions of family and friends, and put real work into making a dream into reality.

If you've been dreaming, how much of that dream is still fantasy and how much is concrete planning? How much work have you done in preparation for the day you stand on your own? Dreams are pleasant, but reality is much more fulfilling. Get started with your plans today. That's what this book is about: working for yourself.

Self employment can be much better than a job. For example, many of the unemployed have skills and are capable of finding work, but are hampered by other difficulties such as having to provide child care, physical impediments (lack of reliable transportation, necessary medical or physical therapy treatments, etc) and other difficulties. Traditional employers are unsympathetic and don't offer much flexibility.

Self employment can offer a way around these problems. If you are really stuck at home, self employment can give you the ability to schedule your own working time.

When you are your own boss, you can schedule your work time around medical appointments, child care and other less flexible commitments. If you are only available a few hours a week, that's at least better than not being able to work at all, and it's far better than having to deal with an employer who doesn't want to work around your schedule.

Somebody once said "I've been rich and I've been poor, and rich is better". I feel that way about being self employed. I've been working for myself since 1977, and although I did take a few years here and there working as an employee, I wouldn't have it any other way. That's more than thirty years of experience hammering out a living - I've learned a thing or two along the way.

Self employment isn't all roses, of course. Nor is it necessarily the path to financial security, although I really do believe that you have far more security working for yourself than you do for anyone else. There are good things, there are not so good things. This little book will be talking about the good, the bad, and everything in between. Self employment isn't for everyone, but it just might be for you.

Reality

When magazines run stories about self-employed people, they usually talk only about the great successes (the gal who started in her basement and now owns MegaComp, Inc.) or the failures (the guy who hocked everything he owned and went bankrupt). Those are the extreme. The real story of the self-employed is people quietly supporting themselves at about the same income level as their employed peers, working more or less as long, more or less as hard.

This book is not about starting the next Microsoft and selling out for a bazillion dollars. Maybe that will happen to you, but it probably won't. Frankly, you are far more likely to fall flat on your face and fail miserably than to get filthy rich. And honestly, I'm not the guy who knows how to get filthy rich. I do know a thing or two about not failing, though. I wrote this book to try and pass some of that knowledge on to you.

Again, this is not a “get rich quick” book. It's not even a “get rich eventually book”, though that's certainly possible. It's a “here are some issues you should think about” book.

Unlike most books in this vein, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on the mechanics. Yes, you need licenses, permits and all that. Those are a given, and I'll touch on them briefly, but the focus here is on succeeding, not “how to open a business”.

This is also a “shoestring” book. I'm not talking about getting financing from a venture capitalist. I'm talking about being a computer tech, doing yard service, opening a small store front, starting a delivery service, a cleaning service: the kind of business that takes little or no up front capital.

If you work for yourself, you might go bankrupt (but that's not likely), or you might get wealthy, but chances are you'll just make the same sort of living you would doing it for someone else. You might work a little harder or for longer hours than you would as an employee. You might have a bit more freedom to choose your customers and your time off. But for most of us, life is mostly work and plenty of it. Being self employed doesn't automatically change that. Your nose is probably still going to be right up next to that grindstone, maybe even closer.

So why bother? Well, for one thing, there is that chance of making more money, maybe a lot more money. If that's your goal, you probably have a better chance of reaching it on your own than waiting to be promoted to CEO of IBM. That's especially true if your education has been more hard knocks than ivory tower: while people do get promoted on talent and merit, most of the people doing the promoting want to cover their bets by seeing diplomas attached to the experience. If you don't have that sheepskin, being your own boss makes it unimportant.

There's also freedom, and I really think that this is the most important benefit. I don't mean freedom to take vacations when you want or to work the schedule that you like, although those certainly are possible benefits. What I mean is freedom to control your own destiny. When you work for someone else, your fortunes are tied to their fortunes and also to their whims. If they do well, you might do well also, but you also may be discarded like yesterday's newspaper. That unhappy situation may have nothing to do with your skills: someone you don't even know may run a spreadsheet that says your job has to go.

When you work for yourself, you may lose customers or have a bad year but you probably won't decide that your job has to go, right? You won't fire yourself because your business needs to trim its budget. Maybe you'll make less money this month or this year, but you won't be completely empty-handed.

Well, that's not always true: it's possible to screw things up royally, end up in debt and be forced into giving up. That's possible. It happens. But maybe I can help you avoid that disaster. And THAT is what this book is about.

Freedom and happiness

The most unhappy, stressed out people are those who are responsible for results, but can't do anything to affect or control those results. That's even been shown in animal studies, and there has been some fuss in management circles about "empowerment" and the like with the idea of giving workers more power to make choices and control some aspects of their work environment, thereby making happier workers.

The happiest people, of course, are those who can control their environment. That's just natural; we like to make choices. Most people get to do that fully only in their personal lives. We understand that all those choices won't be the best, that some of them will turn out badly, but we still want to make them ourselves. We choose our own friends, we choose our favorite foods, we choose our own hobbies, and most of us wouldn't want it any other way.

In the workplace, however, no matter how "empowered" you are, most of us don't really get to make our own choices. Someone above you, often a faceless someone, is making decisions that can drastically affect your life, and you don't have much control at all. Often there may be a whole hierarchy of people “above” whose actions affect you. Their decisions affect your salary and benefits and perhaps even small things like whether or not there is free coffee for employees. You may have to wear certain clothes, even specific colors because someone “in charge” has decreed so. The higher you are in the organization, the more control you have, but for most, there isn't much. Most workers are relatively powerless.

Unless you work for yourself, of course. Then you have total control, and (of course) total responsibility. That responsibility sometimes scares people. I know, I've been through it and I've heard it from plenty of other people: I'm not good enough, I'm not smart enough, I don't know enough. I'll never make it. Consider this, though:

If you are good enough for someone to employ you, you are good enough to work for yourself.

It just makes sense: your boss needs to you do a job. Obviously you are good enough so that boss was willing to hire you. If that's true, his customers (or other customers just like them) will be willing to "hire" you, too. We'll be talking a lot about that here.

That is where true security comes from. When you are an employee, your security comes from the opinions and needs of a handful of people, sometimes even just one person. If they decide that you aren't doing the job they want, or that their needs have changed, your security just disappears instantly. But if it comes from a dozen, a hundred, or a few thousand customers, then the loss of one who doesn't like you, or whose needs have just outgrown you, isn't important. Your income may drop a little this month, but it doesn't stop, and there is always a new customer just around the corner. That's real security.

Details, details

Many of the specifics this book deals with being a technical consultant in the computer field. That's because that's what I've done most of my life. However, I've done other things too. I've sold heavy industrial equipment, owned a hobby store, sold rare coins: the ideas, concepts and lessons I'll be talking about are applicable to any small business. A personal trainer, a plumber, a wood-carver: different skills, but tremendous commonality.

Somebody once said to me “Self employed people are just people between jobs”. Fair comment, actually: a lot of people take a stab at self employment between jobs. Why not? If the severance pay is spent and the unemployment compensation has run out, why not try to earn a few bucks while trying to find a new job?

That's fine, but that's not who this book is written for. This book is for the person who aches to work for themselves, for the person who knows that they can do as well or better than the people now paying their salaries. If you start a business because you are out of work but are constantly looking for employment rather than customers, your heart just isn't in it, and you probably won't last. If you are going to do it, set your sights on success.

Get your own ball

The Mature Market reports that the number of older folks starting their own businesses is increasing. That makes sense, it's easier to do a startup when you are a little older; the kids are grown, maybe you've put some money aside, you have more skills - it all adds up. But there's another reason people seek self employment, and that's when the big kids won't ever throw them the ball.

You know what I mean: first grade recess, and the older kids are ignoring you. The same thing happens in business: young people, older people, women and minorities can have less opportunity in business. The big kids don't seem to want you to play.

One way to avoid that is go out and start your own business: bring your own ball and play your own game.

Reentering Workforce Poses Problems For Women reports women feeling frustrated and depressed by lack of opportunity and also notes that the number of self employed women is increasing That's especially true for immigrant women and they cite “discouraging experiences in the conventional work force” as one reason for this.

I've heard it suggested that the destruction of New Orleans has a silver lining for the poor there; the great demand for services during reconstruction will be an ideal time for people to strike out on their own.

When the big kids won't let you play, go start your own game.

Failure

It's been claimed that only two thirds of small business startups survive the first two years and that less than half last four years. Those are scary figures, but they may not be accurate. Is it failure if you change your mind and decide to do something else? Maybe, because the economics of the business might have been why you moved on. It wouldn't be fair to say that only the businesses that actually go bankrupt are failures – if we did that, the failure rate is only around 1% (see “What's Behind High Small-Biz Failure Rates?” ). One percent – that's one in one hundred if you've forgotten all your grade school math. That means 99% of small businesses do NOT go bankrupt!

Most of the failures I've seen were of the “moving on” variety. The business didn't really fail, it just wasn't bringing in enough money for its owner to feel it was worth the trouble. They closed down and moved on to something else – maybe a traditional job or maybe another stab at self employment but with a different focus. That's not quite as scary as “less than half last four years”, is it? They didn't crash and burn, they just moved on.

I'll talk later about my “failures”. They were all “moving on” failures - I gave up for various reasons and went on to do something else. The businesses didn't “fail” - I just stopped working at them.

So here we are. You want to work for yourself; I've been doing that for decades. You want to succeed. Let's see how I can help you.

Micro Business

This book is much more about “micro business” than anything else. I've owned a business with five employees and I was in a partnership that had many more, so we will touch upon some of these things but the main focus is very small businesses – one or two people.

The Lone Wolf

I very much have a “lone wolf” attitude. I like to be self sufficient, like to hold all the reins all the time. That's not the only way to run a business and it's guaranteed to keep you small.

You may want to stay small: I do. But if your goal is bigger things, I will be talking about how you get to that also. The “lone wolf” attitude is always going to be there, and you'll see that it definitely colors my writing, but if you find yourself too much in “I'll do everything myself!” land, remember, that's just me. It doesn't have to be you. You can have partners and employees. You can outsource and sub-contract. You can form informal teams with other micro businesses. You don't have to be me.

There are people who disagree. For example, I've seen the book “The E-Myth Revisited” recommended all over the web. The Amazon reviews are mostly gushing and glowing.

I didn't like it at all, mostly because of his assertion is that sole proprietor businesses can't survive. Really? I know a lot that have, including my own. As to his love affair with franchising (that is, turning your business into a franchise), well, that's his opinion, but not every business needs to franchise.

Of course I feel that way because of my “lone wolf” attitude and the fact that I like being a micro-business. I don't want to be a big business – I don't even want to be a “small” business. I like being a one person business, so that book was not written with me in mind. But even at that, I think there is more wrong here.

First of all, it's mostly fluff. Something that you or I might say in three sentences turns into a long chapter here. I could sum up everything he has to say in a couple of pages. I could almost do it in a few sentence fragments: you need business skills to run a business, as your business grows you can't be a perfectionist, franchising is the path to your success. There, now you don't need to read page after page of annoying conversations between Michael Gerber and the Sad Sarah the Pie Maker.

OK, yes, I'm a little prejudiced toward sole proprietorship. I've said elsewhere that I'm a lousy manager and didn't do well with employees. But that doesn't mean that I think no self employed person can hire employees. Hiring employees is a big decision (we'll talk about that a little later) but I'm not opposed to the idea. I'm not opposed to franchising – I just don't think you HAVE to franchise to survive. If you prefer to remain in your happy sole proprietorship, why shouldn't you?

I suppose Michael Gerber is right in one sense: sole proprietor businesses have to end eventually if for no other reason that sooner or later their owners will die. Or get sick. Or retire. But that's not failure.

If you have dreams of franchising your startup, maybe you should read his book. On the other hand, don't believe his nonsense about sole proprietors being doomed to failure. It's just not true.

Lone wolves can survive. But that doesn't mean everybody wants to be a lone wolf or even a micro business. Some readers will want to be much more.

Look for the Wolf

Whenever you see this howling wolf in these pages, remember that's just the wolf in me talking and it may not apply to you if you have dreams of a bigger business.

You can think of the wolf as a symbol of sage advice if you want to be a wolf yourself, or as a warning that the advice may not apply to you at all. It all depends on your makeup and desires.

The Joy of Self Employment

Wednesday morning. I have a customer to see near Worcester. It should be a quick call, an hour at most. It's fall, the leaves are turning, and we haven't been out to the Berkshires in years. My wife packs up some car snacks and we head off to my customer.

We've deliberately left after 9:00 AM to avoid rush hour traffic. There's nothing urgent about this call, and we'd rather not be stressed. We drive leisurely, talking and planning our day. When we reach my customer, my wife drops me off and heads for a nearby mall. She has a little shopping she needs to get done but has brought a book in case I do get tied up longer than expected. I'll call her when I'm done.

The job turns out to be very easy – just a simple misunderstanding of how things work complicated by not noticing that the Caps Lock key was on. I spend a few extra minutes checking their servers to be sure everything is current and that no problems are looming, but I'm done in half an hour. I know my wife has barely had time to get started at the mall so I really don't want to call her back yet. It's a nice warm day and a half hour walk to the main road, so I set out on foot. A pleasant walk is relaxing and as we'll be sitting in the car for quite a few hours today, I like the idea of a walk anyway. I call my wife and tell her what I'm doing ; we arrange to meet at the main road in half an hour.

I have a nice walk, she gets some shopping done. She picks me up and we head down the Pike toward Rte 91. We'll take that north to Rte 2 and enjoy the scenic route out to North Adams. Along the way we'll stop at the tourist places to stretch our legs and browse. We're in no hurry.

We have lunch in Williamstown and then head south on Rte 43. We used to have a summer place out here so we know the area well. In Pittsfield we stop at Ben and Jerry's for desert, stop a few more times in Lenox and then back on the pike to head home. It's been a fun day, we are pleasantly tired and a little hungry when we get back a little before 7:00 PM.

That's a nice little unplanned vacation day. My wife and I do that sort of thing often and why not? I've made some money and the mileage that my customers pay for has often brought us close to where we want to go. Effectively the customer has paid for part of our vacation day.

How much vacation do you get when you work for someone else? A few weeks? You probably have to schedule the time in advance, right? How do you feel when it rains?

If Wednesday had been a lousy day, my wife would have stayed home. I would have gone to the job myself and been back before lunch. That flexibility is one of the real joys of working for yourself: when that perfect day for leaf peeping comes up, you are free to do it. I might have even rescheduled that job if it wasn't on our way (though you don't want to upset customers with too much arbitrary rescheduling!). We might have worked it out so that we could stay over and perhaps hit another job on the way home. It's all very flexible and fluid and the final point is that we don't even know how much “vacation” we take. Basically, we take as much as we want whenever we want.

It's a nice life.

The Pain of Self Employment

One of our daughters lives in Virginia. While she and her husband come up to visit every year, it's been a while since we've been down there. We'd like to take at least a week off and see them. We'd like to spend some time at the Smithsonian while we're there, so maybe two weeks would be more like it.

Two weeks is very hard to do. Even one week is harder than you'd think: it's pretty likely that some customer will need on-site attention in any given week. In two weeks, it's almost a guarantee. I can do the trip, but it may end up very stressful, spending hours on the phone trying to do something I could do in minutes in person. As my business is computer stuff, I'm lucky in that a lot of it can be done from anywhere; the Internet has really changed my working life. But some things still require being there, for political reasons if for nothing else. Two weeks away can be very, very hard.

When you first start out, even stealing an hour can be difficult. You might find yourself working more hours per day and more days per week, and that's especially apt to be true when you start out. Worse, you might even be making less money overall than you were at your normal job. That's not necessarily the worst thing in the world: sixty hours doing something you love is much better than twenty hours of something you really dislike, but the time investment can interfere with the rest of your life.

Even being officially not at work can be difficult. There has been many a family party that I've had to excuse myself from to deal with a customer problem. Of course that can happen with a regular job too, but when the business is yours, all problems belong to you personally. If you are a sole proprietor without employees, you are obviously the only person to deal with problems.

Self employed people have other problems now and then. Two words most are very familiar with: “cash flow”. You can actually be doing very well and be very busy but because customers can pay slowly, you might still have nothing in the bank. That's stressful. You can also be in a dry spell and NOT be doing very well and have nothing in the bank. That's even more stressful. I'll be talking much more about cash flow and dry spells later; the point now is just that self employment doesn't mean you are never going to be unhappy and stressed. It does mean that you have more options to correct the things that are making you unhappy, but it doesn't mean that you aways can correct or control them.

Probably the most frustrating thing that can happen to a self employed person is a sudden opportunity that's too big too take. It might require buying equipment you simply can't afford, for example. Or it might simply take more manpower than you can muster. You can see the potential profit, but it just can't be done or there's too much risk in doing it. By the way, I know someone who mortgaged their home in order to finance a really big equipment sale to a customer. Unfortunately, that customer went bankrupt before paying him. Lost profits are one thing, but a lost home is quite another. Don't make that kind of mistake.

Sometimes your expectations of your self employed life don't match reality. You thought you'd never have to make another sales presentation? Think again. Hate cold call prospecting? Most self employed people have had to do a lot of that. Self employment isn't just doing the things you like to do. You may not have a boss forcing you to do something you truly hate, but you may still have to do it.

My story

Who hasn't thought of working for themselves? I know quite a few who have more than thought it: they, like me, have actually done it and do run their own ship. If you are one who hasn't made that switch but still has the dream, I wish you luck and hope that you can join us soon.

Maybe you want to be a consultant, or sell something on the web , be a full time "pro-blogger" or maybe it's something else entirely. It doesn't matter: you have a dream and (I hope!) a plan and you know you can get there.

My first brush with self employment was in 1977. I was in a retail store partnership with several other people and most of us also worked at the store. Retail can be fun, but the store owns you, so it felt much more like having a job and as I was only a minority "owner", in reality that's what it was. After a few years I saw the business was heading for trouble, so I sold my interest and took a "real" job again. At that time I had the dream of working for myself, but didn't know what I might do.

Over the next year I thought about just that, and realized that what I wanted was something to do with computers whether I worked for myself or someone else. So I took a job with Tandy Corporation in one of their now long gone Tandy Computer Centers as a Customer Support Rep.

I enjoyed that, but shortly Tandy started losing badly to IBM, and my income, which was mostly based on store profits, sank to a dismal level. I had gained some skills by then and knew a few people who needed them, so in 1983 I went out "on my own". That first year wasn't much better than working at minimum wage, but it improved quickly, and by 1985 I was doing pretty well. Well enough that I took on a partner and three other employees.

That was a complete disaster. Only one of the employees was productive, and one was actually stealing from us. That first partner was ineffectual and a money sink and by 1987 I was nearly six figures in debt. I fired all but one employee and took him on as a partner after getting rid of the first partner. I was angry, disappointed, full of recriminations and self doubt. Then the "good" employee moved cross country and I was once again alone. I had that debt, no savings, no 401K, no investments.. I was depressed, angry and near broke.

I struggled by for a couple of years, but these were dark times. The money was OK, but the crush of the incurred debt weighed on me. In 1991, one of my better clients offered me a job that would allow me to keep operating my consulting business as a profit center within their business. It seemed like a good idea, so I took it, and actually was pretty happy there. I had the benefits of a "real job", but I also had many of the benefits of working for myself.. it wasn't bad.

But then they got bought out by a larger corporation and I felt I had to leave. I can't work in a large company: the politics, the difficulty of getting simple decisions made - it's not for me. So I left, and went back to me, myself and I once again.

Less than a year later, another client offered me a job. This seemed like a real opportunity: manage the tech department of a growing sales organization. My lone-wolf business wasn't doing badly, but this would give me the opportunity to grow, to learn some things I just couldn't find time for on my own.. after almost a month of kicking it around, I took the job.

I realized it was a horrible mistake within a year. However, I had burned my bridges and my old customers had mostly not transitioned with me to this new outfit. Can't blame them: this group charged very high prices and was sometimes hard to deal with, but the final line was that I was a little trapped - the money was good, and if I left, I'd have to start mostly from scratch. I swallowed hard and hung in, but things got worse and worse there and in 1997 I bit the bullet and left the job.

That was more than ten years ago. I actually recovered business much more quickly than I thought I would and only had minor cash flow problems for a few months. After that, everything settled down and business was good and remains so today. The only debt I have is a small mortgage, I have substantial retirement funds and savings: the dark years are long gone. Not that life is always easy: working for yourself requires constant effort; tomorrows income needs help getting here. But I am where I want to be.

So, all is well that ends well, I guess. A lot of twists and turns getting here, but here I am just the same. I tell you all this because you may face disappointment and setbacks too: most self-employed people have experienced bitter failure at some point in their careers. Somehow they found a way to pick up the pieces and get back to the goal. You can too.

Nice work if you can get it

You've heard that before, right? Well, what about that “if you can get it” part?

It's certainly possible that an offer for a dream job could come out of the blue. Somebody could offer you a fantastic job without you having even known the opportunity existed. But you don't get offered self employment, do you?

That's the thing, isn't it? Self employment requires a conscious act on your part. It doesn't just “happen”, you have to make it happen, and making it happen can be scary. You'll be giving up the regular paycheck. You won't have a boss who tells you what is required for you to earn that paycheck; you will be responsible for figuring out where your money comes from. There are unknowns, fears, uncertainty, doubt.. it can seem like a big leap of faith.

There are times when making that leap is a little easier. When I worked at Tandy, my income had sunk to minimum wage as the store sales plummeted. Minimum wage wasn't enough to live on; I really couldn't even afford the gas to drive to work. I didn't have a lot to lose by striking out on my own.

If you've been laid off, you are in a similar situation. You can't do much worse, so why not give it a try? Even if you don't make as much money as you'd like, you might very well earn more than you'll get from any unemployment benefits – and those eventually stop, right?

But if you are in a comfortable job, making that decision can be hard. When I started up again in 1997, I had wanted to go back to self employment for more than two years previously. I hated what I was doing, really detested the people I worked for, but the money was good and the work really wasn't hard. I had the advantage of knowing that I had previously been at least moderately successful, but on the other hand, who really knows?

And of course it wasn't just me. My poor wife had struggled through the lean times with me and she was enjoying the benefits of my good pay also. She knew I was miserably unhappy, but there's that steady money..

If that's your situation, moving to self employment can be very difficult. If you are married or otherwise emotionally and financially tangled with someone else, your actions affect them also. Maybe you have children (I did) and you have to worry about them as well.

There is a lot to think about, isn't there? Do you really dislike your job that much? Is being told what to do and when to do it really so unbearable? Is self employment the right choice?

For me, the answer was emphatically yes.

However, that's me. I'm very opinionated, very confident, very strong minded. If you and I are sitting in a room and I know nothing about you but suddenly something important has to be done, I'm going to assume that I can probably do it better than you can. I mean no offense, and I could be totally wrong, but that will be my immediate assumption.

How can somebody with that kind of attitude work for someone else?

Somebody with that attitude is going to have a hard time with partners and employees, too. They probably won't want to collaborate with other people. They just aren't “team players”. If that's you, I understand completely because that's me, too.

There's also my feeling that employers are often abusive of their employees. I'm sure many employers feel that their employees can be just as abusive in the other direction – goofing off, taking time off, not giving 110% all the time.. it works both ways. But my gut feeling is that employees get the short end more often than employers do.

When you are sick, you shouldn't have to work. When your kids or your spouse need you, they need you. When you are overtired, you need to rest. You are a human being and you deserve respect, consideration and comfort. You should be able to control your own life.

Unfortunately, employers that encourage individual control are few and far between. In most corporate environments, you'll be on par with any random piece of equipment that corporation owns. In other words, you are disposable. You are just another asset – your humanity is not important.

But that's my opinion. You might be willing to trade a little dehumanizing treatment for a good paycheck. Most people don't see giving up part of their freedom in exchange for money as being all that horrible. It's not like you have to sleep there, right?

Well.. a few years back I got hired by a large corporation to help them with a big network change. There was me and a handful of their regular employees going around from building to building effecting the changes and testing machines. We had started fairly early in the day and had worked through lunch. It was 6:00 or 7:00 o'clock at night and we weren't done yet, so I suggested breaking for something to eat.

The employees looked at me like I was insane. They couldn't stop for food – it wasn't that they weren't tired and hungry but just wanted to finish up, no, they were afraid of their manager! They told me that he would be very angry if we stopped.

I asked where this ogre could be found because I wanted a word with him. They said he was at home.. I asked for his number: if anyone had it, they weren't about to give it to me. So I just left. I went off to get something to eat. I offered to bring back food for the others; they were afraid to do even that.

That, my friends, is abuse. It's why I work for myself.