Friday marks the beginning of my fifth year of unemployment. This time, I mean.
I was laid off from my job at the end of May 2007, just before most of the rest of the people at the company I was working for, and I went back into the freelance market with some trepidation, because I’d taken the job eighteen months earlier due to a couple of rocky years. A lot of my clients had disappeared in the tech bust between 2000 and 2001, I’d had a little brush with mortality the next year that kept me out of circulation for a couple of months, and I’d been actively looking for something more substantial for a while. Then it was gone and I was back on the market, having spent my time in a sort of Director eddy while the rest of the multimedia stream moved on.
And here I am five years out, still in the same situation I was back in 2005 before I took the job, but fifty and with a portfolio of work that gets increasingly creaky with the passing months. I can’t really recommend it.
I still get to work with great people like Duc Le of Duc Designed, Dino Citraro of Periscopic, and Chris Williams at Formations. Folks I’ve known for a decade or more, for the most part.
Reed classmate and magazine editor Chris Lydgate took me on to write a profile for the latest issue of the alumni magazine.
And, of course, Tomer Berda, a colleague from our Director days, continues to inspire the poker playing side of my business.
So there’s that.