My job is actually a contract job, meaning I get paid by the hour. I still get benefits and it's mine as long as something happens, but I'm still considered freelance. Part of my excitement about the job came because when I first got the job, I took the amount of money I was paid hourly, multiplied by it by forty hours and came up with the conclusion that I was about to make gob loads of money. Thus bling-bling dreams of Kristal, iPods and lots of trips to Mexico. Turns out, however, that the job really isn't a forty hour job. The hours are basically something like 9 to 5 with an hour lunch- a total of 35 hours. But it's also kind of flex time in that I could work more if needed or wanted but I could also work less if I wanted to or needed to. For instance, because I'm still training and there's not much for me to do, I got into work all last week at 9:30 and with an hour lunch, I basically worked a 32.5 hour work week.

First off, what this means is that each week I'm presented with the decision of how much I want to work. I could get up at my normal hour and get in at 9:30, and take a short lunch or stay half an hour late. Or I could take a normal lunch and either come in early or get home at 7 instead of 6. Or I could just leave it be and only work 32 hours. Somebody told me that an old freelancer always ate his lunch at his desk just to make sure he got the 40 hour week. I know, the obvious answer is to work the 40 hours to get the full money but it's an easy thing to agree to when it's not, say, 4:30 in the afternoon and there's not much work to do and you're not only half-asleep and on your third cup of coffee, but bored to tears. Plus, if you think it's obvious answer, then you don't really know me that well.

The main thing about all of this, however, is that it means that it's not the salary I thought it would be. So I started figuring out what all this meant in terms of salary. Over the course of a year, five hours a week adds up significantly so that my salary, again based on a forty hour work week, drops about ten thousand dollars. At thirty-two and a half hours, even less. There goes dreams of Kristal, iPods and lots of trips to Mexico. Now it's more like Kristal and iPods, but no trips to Mexico or trips to Mexico but no iPod. This made me kind of bummed, I mean really bummed- I wasn't going to make as much money as I had thought.

Then that little voice in my head came and bitch-slapped some sense into me. What all this means is that I have a flex-time job, a job in which I can still get up at a reasonable hour, can get home at a reasonable hour, and will hardly ever involve working overtime. And since the hourly salary is so good, I can not only afford to work these hours, but live comfortably. In fact, even if I take away the five hours or so a week, it's still way more than I've ever made in my life and way more than I would have gotten elsewhere. In other words, I have just pulled off getting the perfect job- lots of money for not that much work. Score!!!!!

Which, of course, raises the obvious questions: it can't last, can it?