Day 0

Hi. I'm honoured to be taking part in the Unemployment Blog. While you are at work, boredom seeping out of your eyeballs, you can click on this blog and see what carefree little me has been up to. You will go wild with jealousy. You will wish that like me, you were also unemployed. You will want to emulate my lifestyle: this friday night, for instance, I am writing on this blog, maybe watching a movie, and going to sleep sometime before midnight.

And now, a brief history of my unemployment. I work in the internet industry as a contractor, usually with a main more-or-less fulltime job and other freelance jobs on the side. My latest position was as a sub-contractor at Conde Nast. Yes, that's the company "The Devil Wears Prada" was written about. I've read it -- it's surprisingly true! Anyway, my contract ended on Halloween. They had plans to transition me directly into another project at the same company, but they are behind schedule and don't need me yet. The resourcing guy told me that there's nothing available for at least a month, and that made me happy as all hell, because to be perfectly honest, I am damn tired of working.

I was actually planning on taking my extended holiday sometime in January, but this works too. I should note that I am not really unemployed; I'm more like under-employed. Because of the nature of the industry, people are always contacting me for small(ish) projects. I should point out that most of the time, they have absolutely no clue, their ideas are cockamamy, their budgets are miniscule, and to top it all off, they are insane. That's why I've gotten much better at saying NO.

Even though I will try to use most of my time to pursue my interests (more on that in upcoming posts) and think about my future in this industry versus other career paths, I will be doing some... um... work. But don't worry. I won't let it interfere with my unemployment.