The Bee Hive

Paid for by hard work

My coworker K is having major remodeling done to his house. I’m trying to pay down my debts. We’re both contractors working on a project with unrealistic deadlines, and we have been given the freedom to bill as many hours as we need to in order to “get it done.”

We’re a little punchy from being overworked, but we’re also making frequent jokes about how he should put signs up throughout his house that say things like “this high-end showerhead brought to you by the Human Resources portion of the intranet content migration.”

4 Responses to “Paid for by hard work”

klwalton
Posted: Nov 21st, 2003 at 5:29 am

When I was working on the ‘96 Presidential Campaign, on the Dole Press Plane, his plane was called The FriendShip, and ours was called the BullShip. Dave Russ from CNN had a banner made, and it was hung in the back where all us techies sat. It read:

Welcome to the BullShip.
This banner paid for by excessive overtime and padded expense reports.

I bought my Tahoe in Modesto. It was paid for by the stupidity of Gary Condit. My laptop by the 2000 Presidential Campaign.

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red_frog
Posted: Nov 21st, 2003 at 6:05 am

The beach house has a plaque that says, “This is the house that NT Built”.

I kind of like translating my effort into purchasing power. When I had that biweekly column, one column was a house payment. I think that the bathroom ended up eating an awful lot of the money I made off an online book project.
Go you, Kate. You can do this.

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kateo
Posted: Nov 21st, 2003 at 9:17 am

Those are all great stories. I do rather enjoy being a contractor and having my work translate into actual pay, for better or worse. This is one of those times when it’s definitely better.

It certainly sucks for the members of the team who aren’t contractors, but then again, I so far haven’t seen them putting in nearly as many hours as the contractors have. Which is fine — I pick up their slack and bill for it.
My total for this week is looking like 70 hours including tomorrow. That’ll help a lot.