Yes it’s official, this afternoon I have some work to do that might actually be fun! I have been employed to go and play on three separate online casinos, the company that has hired me has also placed $100 in each of the casino accounts and told me that if I win anything I can keep it!

I do have to write a review of each of them around 900 words in length afterwards but I am getting paid for it so I can’t complain. It would be very cool if I could get this kind of job every day instead of some of the really boring stuff I have to write about at times. Just now I finished a 1250 word article that discussed the plastic molding industry, what a completely boring thing to have to write about!

Well I guess it’s jobs like this that keep me living here on Koh Phangan so I cannot complain really.

Too much work, it’s been a decade or more since I last had to set my alarm clock to get up early in the morning and go to work, how come I am having to do this now? I’m a freelancer working from home, it’s supposed to be an easy life!

This has been somewhat of a recurring theme of late, being a freelancer is turning out to be a lot of work, mostly in the area of administration, I’m spending increasing amounts of time writing bids, talking to clients and chasing payment, less and less hour in the day to actually produce the work I am contracted to supply.

I think I’m just going to have to cut right back on the volume of work I am accepting, live with the loss of part of my income and get on with actually enjoying life outside of the house again, after all I live on Koh Phangan, a tropical island, I should be exploiting that more.

Over on a certain freelancers website I have started to indicate in my bids for work that I will only accept projects where the customer agrees to pay via the escrow service operated by the website owners. The reason for this is sometimes people don’t pay, they take delivery of the completed work and disappear. Using and escrow service should minimise this problem.

So, simple enough you would think right? Bid on job, customer accepts bid, you confirm acceptance of the terms, they post the escrow payment, you complete the work, they release the escrow payment. Simple.

But no, some propel are not too bright, they think escrow is used to pay at the end of a project, like using PayPal or something, so I think I am going to have to write a guide to escrow that I can send people along with the project acceptance email. Seriously people need to get an education these days, it’s not hard to understand how an escrow service is supposed to work.

I have so much worked queued up now I really think it’s time to take on an employee, I know a guy in Pattaya who does a similar type of work to me and I have used him in the past for a few thing, maybe I will approach him and see if he would like to set up a more permanent arrangement.

The problem then is things get complicated, right now I have to organise a single work day, my own, looking back on my corporate days managing a team of people I remember how stressful it would get when I had to organise not only myself but my team.

Maybe I should just cut down on the amount of work I am taking on but sometimes it’s just too hard to say no!