Working from home

I've been working from home for about a month now. The benefits are tremendous. I save on gas and aggravation, I can sleep in and work late or get up early and head out early. I can conduct business in establishments that are only open from 9 - 3 on weekdays. My house has much better soundproofing than the office did, so my recordings are of higher quality and have fewer interruptions. But, O! the interruptions. The midmorning doldrums can expand magnificently to fill up time.

And my coworkers clients have started to eat away at my patience. They've done nothing but constrict, tighten, and control my work habits since I started. I can't tell if they just had different expectations of my working from home than I did, or if the distance has started distorting our communications more than I'm willing to allow. It's infuriating that I've had to wait 24 hours - unpaid - on more than one occasion - for a new assignment.

Oh well. The Bose contract is still in limbo, but if I get sick of this job in the next two weeks, I already have another gig to work full-time in January, so MRCC'll have to take backseat anyway.

Kludgey McKludgerpants

Recently, I discovered how to get around the bug in gmail's contacts utility wherein you can't add somebody to a group directly. You first have to add them as a contact.

Tonight, I've come up with a (slightly more efficient) kludge for filing my emails. See, I label everything. I have 10 labels which successfully sort 97.7% of my email, and I star the rest. But, particularly with sent mail, not everything gets labeled. So, every month I have to go back through the entire month's emails looking for things that aren't labeled, and label them. Unfortunately, my gtalk archive kind of crowds it with lots and lots of chats that I don't really care about labeling. While it would be nice to filter my emails to "doesn't have a label", my current kludge is to search for "chat", wade through the chats, and label the emails that have the word chat in them, then search for "-chat" and all the chats disappear and I have a nice, clean, clear email archive.