The Flying Ham Chronicles

This is a declaration to all of my readers.

(My mom, dad, husband, mother in law, a handful of dear friends and a trickle of foot fetishists who land here accidentally…)

This is my declaration: I’ve always wanted to be a freelance writer and now I’m going for it.

It’s always been my goal, but until now, I didn’t know where to start. So I’m just going to start.

It all comes down to the flying ham.

I finished my master’s in June and I wouldn’t say at all that it was anti-climatic, but it wasn’t exactly the magical ticket to some sort of amazingly fulfilling and well-paying job that I maybe thought it was going to be. It did, however, leave me with a finely crafted understanding of strategic communication, marketing and public relations, and connected me to a network of amazingly driven and talented individuals.

And before grad school, I was a writer. I filled my days interviewing artists, musicians, school board members, mayors, restaurant owners, people who got into car accidents, people who got attacked by sharks, people who volunteered, people who had 100th birthdays, people who lived and worked and died (I wrote obituaries too) in a small town on the Oregon Coast. When that wasn’t enough, I submitted freelance pieces to the alternative newspaper, and eventually found a place for myself writing news releases for the local community college.

Somewhere between then and now, our family left the coast and moved to Portland, where I took the first full-time job I was offered- a proofreading position at the Unnamed Company, which allowed me to work during the weekdays and put myself through graduate school during the evenings and weekends, for two solid years. My job was never a challenge, nor did I want it to be at that time. They paid me a decent hourly wage, offered me health insurance and a small contribution to a 401k, a free slice of birthday cake on the last Wednesday of every month and one free turkey for Thanksgiving and one free ham for Christmas.

Last fall, when the university offered me a fellowship that would also pay for one year of tuition, the Unnamed Company was nice enough to let me cut my hours down to 12 or so a week, because I still had to make enough money to stay afloat.

Then the economy tanked, the unemployment rate rose, I graduated and started grinding my teeth with worry about what to do next. With the idea of doing the safest thing during the recession in mind, I approached my boss at the Unnamed Company with the following proposition: That I would like to take on a more active roll at the Unnamed Company, return to full time, and take on more responsibility. I carefully laid out a plan for how I would help their business grow, help gain more clients and offer them more services. And at the end of my shpeel, I asked for a salary increase along with it.

My boss seemed excited and receptive to the idea, and told me he’d need a month to get back to me. And when November 1 came, he and I walked across the building to the Human Resources Lady, where they sat me down and told me, yes, we’d like to have you come back and yes, we want you to take on all of these things and manage your own client accounts and help grow the web communications aspect of the Unnamed Company… but…

We’re not going to give you a salary increase. And then, in a cheery, mocking voice, the Human Resources Lady reminded me that I Do Get a Free Ham at Christmas!

What you need to understand that I would still be getting paid as the proofreader I was originally hired to be. And it’s nothing against the Unnamed Company, really, because they just do what they do. I was mostly just put off by the ham statement at first, and had worked up in my head for a full month that things were going to go the way I wanted them to.

But now I know clearly that this wasn’t want I ever really wanted in the first place. My love was never in the industry the Unnamed Company serves. In fact, I’m pretty much morally against the industry the Unnamed Company serves. And what I’ve always really wanted all along is to make a living by freelancing.

It took me a few days to realize that what seemed at first to be a lack of opportunity is actually a huge opportunity. In response to the offer of the Unnamed Company, I did the following: Declined to return to full time, asked to keep my current responsibilities and return to part time, 25-30 hours a week, more if they really need me and I want to.

And wow, that was scary and for a week or so there, I thought I would get fired all together and I was planning in my mind how we’d get by if that played out. But it didn’t. They are letting me do it, thus far, and now I have this beautiful, golden opportunity to make my little dream grow.

And that’s my declaration. Fly away ham, fly fly away.