$23.64

Why real jobs suck, and I should stick with writing.

Okay, for the last year and a half I've been answering e-mail for a living. No really, I mean that's my Real Job. A lot of the time this is pretty much cutting and pasting responses, but sometimes you have to actually write something from scratch. Last night I got an awful one. The customer had written in at least 50 times in the last 6 weeks and had been handled badly or outright deleted nearly every time. They were, needless to say, upset.

This is what we call an "escalated situation" and results in me passing it up to my supervisor so that someone can call the customer in the morning. Special circumstances in this case meant that my supervisor escalated the concern right back to me. An e-mail response needed to be sent covering the entire complicated situation and my boss knows I'm a writer, capable of explaining things above and beyond the ordinary situations. Lucky me.

So, that was already more backstory than I'd intended, but the point is I had to spend almost an hour working on one lousy e-mail because a few dozen of my coworkers had blown of the previous messages with short answers or passed the buck, and it was a pain in the ass. When I was done I threw my reply into a word counter and multiplied by the rate I've received for my published writings so far. $23.64. Getting paid by the word is definately better.