Freelancing Crisis

I'm babysitting my nephew as I type this, but he's mumbling under his breath and jumping around wildly as he plays Lego Star Wars, so I bet he won't even notice I'm typing away on my blog.

Last week I hit a huge speed bump in my freelancing career. While I've had bad days before, I've never had a time when I regretted freelancing or wishing I was back at a "regular" company. Until last week. A server that I use for most of my really good clients crashed, and crashed hard, for several days. I not only dished out some monetary credits to my customers for their inconvenience, but I also took three days out of my schedule to get them moved over to an actually active server.

As I moved files, backed up databases and swapped around DNS information and configuration files, I couldn't help thinking, in the back of my head, that maybe freelancing was a stupid career choice. The crisis turned what was going to be a very good April, financially speaking, into a barely adequate one because of the credits dished out and the work lost. And honestly, I'm a computer nerd by necessity, not really because I love computers. I DESIGN websites, but this server nonsense is stuff I leave in the hands of professionals and I hate doing it myself. And yet, here I was, for 3 days straight dealing with this stuff exclusively. I thought freelancing was supposed to help me be more selective about the jobs I took, not less.

In the end, as the servers came back online and I was actually able to get a full night's sleep again, I realized that this is one of those hits you take when you're your own boss, making your own way in the world and acting as a 1-man company. Sometimes it's about doing things you don't feel like doing in putting in stupidly long hours  to solve problems that weren't your fault. But then, other times, it's about taking a Monday off to baby sit your nephew. It's a great career and after doing this for the last 7 months exclusively, I can't picture myself doing anything else. Except illustration.