As some of you know I'm self employed. It's a bit of a plate spinning act.
I have a couple of zero hours jobs in an area of work that I love working in. I have a ton of experience in this and have also worked freelance in this field for nationally/internationally recognised companies. This is the same field that XH works in - though not the same job. I juggle them all so that I can work on my own creative work as well.
The zero hours jobs work for me on the premise that I have so much experience, I don't have to think too hard when I'm doing them - I'm really on autopilot. So that gives me a whole lot of energy to devote to my own creative work.
This past year, one of those zero hour jobs has gone into free fall (through their company circumstance, not through any fault of my own). I've lost a lot of my income and had to devote a lot of time an energy to looking for something to fill the gap it left. I didn't manage to find one single thing, but what I did find was more a patchwork of things in different/related areas to try and fill the gap. It's been very time consuming, tiring and a little bit stressful too. On the plus side, it's really expanded my CV.
Over the past couple of months it looked like this zero hours job might be getting back on track again. And I was delighted by that, as I really love it and was half considering waiting around for things to even out again with them so things could go back to the way they have been. Anyway, there have been more than a couple of mishaps on their side over the past couple of months - ones that have ended up costing me money. The most recent one being that half my work for this coming week with them was cancelled yesterday through their error. I don't get any compensation from them for this and it's too late for me to find anything else (my shifts were Monday and Tuesday).
In my past life I think I would have somehow just accepted this and waited for them to offer me more work. Or I might have replied with something short and curt that made it obvious that I was pretty angry.
Now, I just found another very similar position to apply for. It's the same type of zero hours job, but for a bigger company. I sent in my application yesterday.
I would have been really happy staying where I was, and they could have gotten someone who was really good at their job wit more experience than anyone else working there. Instead, time to move on and find somewhere that's going to suit me, and let me concentrate a little more on my own creative work. And I've not burnt any bridges in the process, like I might have done in the past.
