Check it out,
I’ve been in the trades for as far back as I can remember and one thing’s for sure, I’ve always performed top notch work for my customers and made sure I left them with smiles on their faces. Never a complaint in over 22 years.
I was posting my services on Craigslist back in the day when there was virtually no competition and let me tell ya, that was a great time to be around. I could place my ad and within a few hours or so I’d have enough work lined up where I would literally have to pull my ad that same day. No joke. The good old days of CL.
With the spread of Craigslist over time, I started to notice more and more competition and although it was a drag at first, I soon got the upper hand. A better ad and a web page with some pictures was all it took.
Once again, I was enjoying a quick turnaround from my ads and I worked many months like that until out of the blue, I get this e-mail from some random dude and all it said was “you better get a bond or face serious consequences”.
Now as much as I hate to say it, that e-mail freaked me out a bit because for me it was more than just a strange e-mail, it was a sign of an upcoming turning point in my life and one I wasn’t ready to face.
Normally I’d work my butt off for a few weeks, make good bread and screw off as much as humanly possible and the thought of that lifestyle coming to a screeching halt wasn’t something I was too comfortable with to say the least.
I never really planned ahead for anything when I was growing up and I most certainly never planned on getting a contractor’s license. Hell, I thought I’d be a rock star by the age of 21 and I definitely never had any intentions on being a carpenter for as long as I was. It just sort of happened. I got older, better at my craft and with age comes less options. I was just stuck is all.
As intended that damn e-mail started to get the best of me after awhile so I finally made a dash over to the old computer to see what was going on. I went to Craigslist and did a little research in my Skilled Trade Services category and what I found there was an absolute and brutal shock to the system and if you don’t know already, brace yourself.
There were (and still are) people ratting out freelance carpenters on C.L. Flagging posts and going as far as contacting the city or state about us! These A-Holes even took the time to post their own ads discouraging our potential customers from hiring anyone without a bond, claiming anyone without a license does poor work. They were fairly decent ads too and some came fully equipped with links to the proper government agencies and everything.
What’s the worst part?, you ask. The worst part is, (and not for the squeamish)
They’re fucking contractors! That’s right, I said CONTRACTORS!
My apologies and excuse my fucking French, but can you believe that shit?! I mean what the fuck?
Now these are people who we’ve worked side by side with, eaten lunch with, had beers with and on occasion enquired about the well being of their families and yet, this is how they do us. Well not in my world.
Where I come from, a tradesman is a tradesman, licensed or otherwise. I come from a place where hard work, dirty boots, sore backs and electrical tape bandages is an automatic induction into the BROTHERHOOD and at no point in my life would I even consider trying to screw over a Brother. Neither would a true contractor who understands what it means to be a tradesman amongst tradesman.
After reading multiple posts in multiple cities and states, I pretty much realized I was screwed because there was no way in hell I could compete with something that big and widespread. After all, I’m just one guy and there were many of them. Of course they had far more free time to write their ads than I did, but that’s a different story. Or is it? Shouldn’t they have been at work? I was.
Needless to say, I couldn’t take a “regular job” after being self employed for as long as I’d been because I wasn’t about to go from making rockin’ cash and working on my own schedule to making a crap wage at a crap job. 40 hrs a week? Come on! I was only good for 7 hrs a day, not to mention the fact that we were now talking about consecutive weeks.
Huh? What about hangover days? Hell no! I just couldn’t do it.
To make matters worse, I started thinking about the victims who had families to support and wondered how they were doing. For me it was just bills and beverages but there were no rug rats depending on me for anything. I do have a Brother who has a couple of puppies and one thing I learned from him is that kids cost a fortune so it’s clearly not a position where job and money surprises are welcome.
With that in mind, I got pretty fired up about the reckless selfishness of these ass wipes and that was the octane I needed to push harder for a way out. Under no circumstances were they going to get the best of me because I’ve never been one to roll over and take it. Unlike some people out there who undoubtedly prefer it.
So I’m out there runnin’ around for a few months looking for something decent, but couldn’t find a damn thing. I was looking into all of the under the table gigs, but there was nothing that was remotely promising or met my very specific guidelines. You know the ones. Little work, good pay and freedom.
Saying that nothing looked good is a huge understatement. The choices were shit so I did what anyone would do when staring responsibility in the eyes. I looked for one of those work at home in your underwear gigs. None of which made any sense at all and also looked like shit, so the hunt continued.
Here’s a little side note: Two things happen when you’re not working. You may have more time for researching job possibilities, but you tend to run out of money and that’s exactly what happened.
I found myself with stacks of bills lying on damn near every surface in my place. Not entirely unusual, but this was far worse than it had ever been. The bills even started changing colors to signify the stages of impending doom. At that point, I had completely given up on opening anything anymore. I mean what was the point? I knew exactly what they were, I just couldn’t pay the damn things because I was dead ass broke.
I was running out of things to sell too. The old motorcycles, the drums and the guitars were all gone. Some of my tools and almost all of my CD’s had found their way into the hands of the incredibly fair owner of the local pawn shop.
Now poor is one thing, but losing my pad was another because I’ve never been much for living with friends or relatives. Just the thought of that possibility was making my head spin. I mean really, let’s just say your out one night and you meet this chick. She’s had a few, you’ve had a few...
Not as cool when your sharing a pad with someone. Am I right? You just know someone’s getting up in the middle of the night for a glass of water or a bowl of Cheerios.
That’s it! I was in HELL.
I had no choice but to dig deep and that’s pretty much all I did day and night. Over time I fine tuned my Google skills to Ninja status and I ended up in what seemed like some underground world. Different for sure and what I discovered there was better than I could have imagined. It was a world of lazy money makers. Wahoo! I was finally home. They were people just like me, only a lot of them were just kids and by the looks of things, they were doing way better than I’d ever done working in the trades.
Naturally I was all over that like stink on shit and started contacting some of them through forums and got to know a few of them pretty well, but there was this one really cool chick by the name of Ella that I would exchange emails with from time to time.
For the most part, she’d zip over some good advice or a link to this or that, but one day she included an attachment. Being the pig that I am, I was seriously hoping there’d be a little nudity involved, but no such luck. Plain old text, but it did turn out to be just about the best damn thing anyone had ever sent me. Not only was it free, it completely saved my bacon!
She sends me this invite to her website and once I finally got in, everything made sense. All the crap I was trying to figure out was sittin’ right there and that’s when everything got a little better. What I learned from one goofy file turned everything around for me. Not only did it get me back on my feet again, but I’m now living way better than I’d ever been before the Craigslist rats ever scurried into town.
Now I work about an hour or two a day at home, or anywhere else for that matter. I make far more cash than I ever did in my two decades of carpentry. There’s no more getting up at the crack of dawn, no more trips to Home fuckin’ Depot and I have even more time to screw off than I ever did before.
Now I spend most of my time either BUYING stuff from Craigslist or riding one of my latest new toys!
