So, why exactly am I doing this? There are multiple advantages I can think of, even at one o'clock in the morning. Most of all, I like learning new things. A few months ago, XHTML was like, well, a foreign language, and now, when I get a message like 'unmatched body tag at line 18' or 'nested editable region at line 7', my response is not "What the %%^&" but rather, "Oh, sure", just as if some had asked me if I wanted non-fat or whole milk.
And, speaking of Starbucks, that is another reason that I simply cannot think seriously of going back to work for someone else, as one of my coffee cups said,
"Not a morning person doesn't even begin to cover it."
In all seriousness, I very much enjoyed teaching Algebra to middle school students, but every time I think about going back to it, I remember how I feel when I wake up before 9 a.m. and the thought of having to be at work day after day at 8 a.m. just makes me shudder in horror. If there was a job teaching middle school math that started at 10 a.m., I would probably still be a teacher.
Variety is great. I can move from using Dreamweaver to SAS to Access. From Mac OS X to Windows. I don't particularly like Windows but I think it is good to have a broad spectrum of skills with operating systems and applications.
Many years ago, when I was teaching college, a student who was about to graduate asked me if I had any advice, since he had taken several courses from me, he thought I might know him better than most of his professors. He added,
"And I don't see you as being as up-tight as the rest of the faculty."
I took that kind of like being called the tallest midget. From knowing him, I suggested that we had in common a tendency to want to live life by our own rules and given that, I did not think he would be very happy in a large, bureaucratic organization like a school district or Fortune 500 company.
Learning
something new every day is a major attraction to owning a small
business. For anyone who ever believed that variety is the spice of
life, I recommend running a small business.
There is also the fact that I almost never have to be out of bed before 8 in the morning, that I have mastered the well-nigh impossible task of living in LA without having to commute, since I telecommute from my house, and I almost never have to wear a business suit.
I do think the stereotype of consultants who telecommute as working naked is misinformed. I work in jeans and a t-shirt. After you get to a certain age, no one wants to think about you working naked, not even at 1 a.m.
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