About Me and An Eclectic Mind

Maria LangerI've been a freelance writer since 1990 and have written over 70 books and hundreds of articles about computers, software, and online services. You can find support for my work, as well as new articles, on Maria's Guides. These days, I'm also writing about aviation and travel for a variety of print and online publications.

I'm also a commercial helicopter pilot and owner of Flying M Air, a helicopter tour and charter company based in Arizona. My company offers tours, day trips, multi-day excursions, and aerial photography services throughout the southwest.

And if that's not enough to keep me busy, I'm also a serious amateur photographer. I show off my work on my photo gallery, Flying M Photos.

An Eclectic Mind is my personal journal of thoughts and experiences; a look into my life.

Interesting Links, September 2, 2010

September 2, 2010 at 11:30 pm
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Here are links I found interesting on September 2, 2010:

  • Sneaky Hate Spiral – Read this and say it ain't so — I dare you. On Hyperboleandahalf.com. Thanks to @MikeTRose for sharing the link.
  • Mythbusters: Where Is the Mythbusting? – "In no way does Mythbusters deserve its high reputation in the skeptic community for promoting skepticism or critical thinking. It doesn’t." Brian Dunning got this one right. On Skepticblog.

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Freelancers Don’t Get Sick Pay

September 2, 2010 at 8:48 am
2 comments

We actually work for a living.

It occurred to me the other day that there’s a huge difference between employees and freelancers. I don’t mean to say that I suddenly saw the light — I didn’t. I’ve known the differences for a long time. But the other day, I actually stopped for a moment to think about them. I thought I’d share some of my thoughts here, laid out in a simple table to make comparison easier.

Employees Freelancers
Employees can stop looking for work once they get a job. The only times they need to look for work again is if they want to change jobs, they get fired, or they need a second job. Freelancers are always looking for work, even when they’re working. The ability to earn a living depends on having the next job lined up.
Employees seldom have to worry about losing their jobs to someone who claims he can do it cheaper. Freelancers are constantly competing for work with others who claim they can do the same job for less money.
Employees usual do one job at a time, although that job might entail several concurrent projects for the same employer. Freelancers often work on several jobs for several clients concurrently.
Employees are usually given all of the tools and equipment they need to perform their jobs. These tools are usually purchased, maintained, and updated by their employers. Freelancers usually have to buy, maintain, and update all of the tools and equipment they need to perform their jobs.
Employees often spend part of their workday socializing with coworkers around the water cooler, coffee room, offices/cubicles, cafeteria, etc. Freelancers often work alone. Most time spent socializing is not time they’re being paid for.
Employees often get benefits that include paid vacations, paid holidays, paid sick days, health care, pension contributions, profit sharing, and bonuses. There are holiday parties, company picnics, and sometimes even birthday cakes. Freelancers don’t get benefits. If they can’t work because of illness, they don’t make money. In the U.S. (and some other countries), they have to pay for their own health care, often at extremely high rates. There are no holiday parties, company picnics, or birthday cakes.
Employees have a predetermined workday, such as 9 to 5. They also get scheduled days off, like weekends and holidays. If they don’t feel like coming into work, they can take a paid sick or personal day off. The flip side of this is that an employee has a limited amount of time off. Freelancers work as long as they need to to get the job done. If that means 12 hour days and lost weekends, so be it. If they don’t feel like working in the middle of a job, that’s too darn bad; the job needs to get done on time. The flip side of this is that a freelancer can have as much time off as he wants, as long as he works enough to earn enough money to survive.
Employees are usually not bothered by their bosses outside their normally scheduled workday. Freelancers can be bothered by clients any time the client wants to make contact (although most clients keep contact within their working hours).
Employees can have annoying or even stupid bosses. Freelancers can have annoying or even stupid clients.
As long as an employee performs his job to some level of satisfaction, he’ll likely remain employed. A freelancer needs to perform high quality work for every job to set himself apart from the competition, with the hope that the client will either give him future work or recommend him to others.
Employees get paychecks. The government ensures that they get paid. Freelancers issue invoices and spend time following up on accounts receivable. They sometimes have to remind, nag, and then possibly sue clients to get paid.
Employees have payroll taxes taken from their pay and remitted to the government. In the U.S., their employers pay 50% of their social security tax liability. Freelancers don’t usually have taxes taken from their pay and remitted to the government. They are required to submit taxes quarterly, along with the related paperwork. If they don’t submit on time, they could be penalized. In the U.S., they are personally responsible for 100% of their social security tax liability.

What did I leave out? Employees and freelancers, use the Comments link or form to fill us in.

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Telemarketing Gone Very Wrong

September 1, 2010 at 6:16 pm
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A telemarketer goes postal on me.

TelephoneAll of my phone numbers are listed in the Do Not Call Registry. I have zero tolerance for telemarketing calls and report every single one I get.

Today, I received a call from 347-982-0051. It was a recording. I pressed 1 and got a company representative. He said he was from YourSearchListing.com. I told him I was on a No Call list and would be reporting his company. They would likely receive a $5,000 fine. I then told him to get a real job and I hung up on him.

I filed the complaint.

Next, I got a call from 714-869-1805. The man on the line was barely understandable. It sounded as if he were looking for someone. I told him he had Flying M Air and asked him if I could help him. He hung up.

I called back, angry. The phone was answered by a recording for YourSearchListing.com, which is “affiliated with Google.” I pressed 7 when prompted and likely wound up with the same guy I spoke to the first time. I told him to stop calling me and hung up.

I filed another complaint.

I was in the supermarket when I got a call from a “private” number. The man on the line, who had some kind of Hispanic accent, asked me if I got his e-mail. I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about. He sounded confused. I realized he was the same guy who’d called the second time. He asked if he was speaking to Maria and I told him he wasn’t. He asked again if I was Maria and I denied it. He then said he made a mistake. I told him he probably had a wrong number and hung up.

When I got back to my RV, I found an e-mail message sent using Flying M Air’s contact form with the following text.

Subject: you bitch

http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/flying-m-air-c370249.html

look at your link bitch
you should get a real fucken job u peace of shit

I followed the link. It was a compliant against my company on ComplaintsBoard.com:

They took me in a tour and what they did is get a girl to give me a blowjob in the air, they are realy an escort service. At the end of it all i let her give me a blowjob for $100 then i decided to fuck her she loved it. I RECOMEND FOR HORNEY GUYS

I understand now why telemarketers are telemarketers. They lack the simple social skills needed to get real jobs and do real work that benefits others. All they know how to do is interrupt people’s lives and then, when people fight back, pull immature and obscene stunts like this.

On the advice of several Twitter friends, I tracked them down via the BBB and filed a complaint. I included the text you see above.

My advice: Do NOT do any business with YourSearchListing.com. They’re likely as fraudulent as the complaint they filed against me.

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About the Cherry Drying Posts

September 1, 2010 at 10:23 am
2 comments

And why they’re password protected.

Drying CherriesA few weeks ago, it came to my attention that this blog was the primary source of information about cherry drying by helicopter. Every day, pilots who wanted to learn more about cherry drying were stopping in to read up.

Normally, I’d be pleased. But I also began to realize that these same pilots were using the information I provided to compete with me for cherry drying work.

That would simply not do.

I Won’t Educate My Competition

The truth of the matter is, there simply isn’t enough work to go around. Every year, I struggle to get my contracts together and signed and then struggle some more to get my standby pay. Other pilots I know who have been doing this work far longer than I have go through the same process. None of us can afford to have competition for what little work is out there.

In my case, it’s particularly tough. I travel from Arizona to Washington and back at considerable cost. This year, I made the trip with only one contract signed. If I hadn’t been able to secure other work, I would have taken a heavy loss.

In this tough economy, I depend on this work to keep my business afloat. Without it, I’d likely have to sell the helicopter. Right now, there simply isn’t enough tour and charter work out there to cover the cost of my fixed expenses, such as insurance, annual maintenance, and hangaring.

So I’ve password-protected the posts, making them inaccessible to most visitors. I’ll likely remove the password once my friends and I stop doing this work.

Some Important Things to Know about Cherry Drying

I do need to say a few things about cherry drying for the folks looking for information.

  • Cherry drying requires a helicopter. If you don’t have a helicopter, you cannot dry cherries. Any company that has helicopters for this kind of work already has pilots. Inexperienced pilots cannot expect to be hired for this kind of work by a company that already has helicopters and pilots.
  • Cherry drying is not a good way to build time. I got less than 20 hours of drying time this summer. I got around 5 hours each of the previous two years. Do you really want to blow a whole summer sitting around in farm country waiting for it to rain just to get 5 to 20 hours of flight time?
  • Cherry drying is not for low-time pilots. When you work, you’re hovering 5 feet over treetops, sometimes in very windy conditions. That means tailwinds and crosswinds and LTE. There’s a lot of dancing on the pedals. There’s a real need to know the helicopter you’re flying.
  • Cherry drying is dangerous. All operations are inside the deadman’s curve. If you have an engine problem, you will crash. Read these accident reports to get a better idea of what can happen: SEA05CA122, SEA04LA102, LAX02LA169, SEA00LA101, SEA00LA103, and WPR09LA371.

I know a lot of helicopter pilots — especially low-time helicopter pilots — out there are desperate for work. If you’re one of them, I can assure you that cherry drying isn’t the solution you’re looking for.

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The Trouble with Tech Editors

August 30, 2010 at 8:45 pm
2 comments

Not usually the problem.

From about August 10 until just the other day, I was working on a book revision. It’s my third pass at this software manual that’s now distributed in ebook form. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to mention what it’s for, so I won’t. It doesn’t really matter, does it?

This book was unusual in that for the first time, it was the technical editors that gave me headaches. (Usually, it’s heavy-handed copyeditors.) My publisher waited until the last minute to contract me and everyone else who worked on the book and, because of that, they had trouble getting a good technical editor. They wound up with two people who apparently have nothing better to do than hang out in the support forums for the software and quite possibly hang on every word posted there. The first one worked on Chapters 2-14 before going on vacation. The other one worked on the rest of the 23-chapter book.

The problem I had centered around their apparent misunderstanding of what their job was. The first one kept commenting to tell me to add every known technique for performing each task. I’d decided early on to stick to menu commands and shortcut keys whenever possible, but she kept telling me to add this toolbar button or that hidden dialog option. It got on my nerves until we told her to stop. The other thing she did was introduce obscure problems that people in the forums have, apparently expecting the book to cover them all.

The other tech editor also drew upon his forum experience, this time expecting me to include marketing material that would clarify information about the features so forum participants would have less to complain about. The book’s a straight how-to — technically, it’s the software manual — so addressing the issues of a handful of forum whiners (the worse kind) isn’t part of the program. But what really got me mad was that this second editor was apparently unable to follow the instructions as written and kept telling me that things didn’t work. I’d have to go back and follow the instructions to see where I’d screwed up. But every single time, the instructions worked exactly as I’d written them. This was a huge time suck.

To be fair, they each did have a few comments that were actually worth acting on. I made a handful of changes that improved the book. That’s what their job was — to help me improve the book. But they didn’t seem to understand what would make the book better. All they seemed to know was what would make the book longer.

What neither understood is that I had about 15 days to revise a 600-page book. That’s not enough time to rewrite the book. All I had to do was add or change material for new or changed features. There weren’t many changes. The book, which was originally written by the software developer’s staff, had very few tech edit comments in the two previous editions I worked on. So I couldn’t figure out why these two editors kept coming up with comments that no one else had.

It’s the damn forums, I guess.

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