The Moron Magnet

The last six months have been great. A long overdue trip to see friends around the world and to get set for working on my own. A brilliant start to my freelance life. More opportunities than I can shake a stick at...

Despite all the great things, one thing has been a great annoyance - my moron magnet. It seemed that everyday I would become frustrated with something and / or someone. It just seemed to take ages for anything to happen.

And it took an old colleague and fellow freelancer to point out to me that it wasn't me, just a couple of things compounding together.

First of all, in my old job, I was surrounded by intelligent & motivated people. They had to be to get let in the car park in the morning. On a daily basis, we would be engaging in small talk, corpoate problem solving and sparking ideas off each other. Now, that has to a greater / lesser degree disappeared, certainly on a daily basis. I would argue that the level of interaction I now have is significantly lower in the intellectual horsepower stakes than I once did (as ever there are exceptions to that rule) and that worries me a bit, in so much that my own intellectual horsepower will diminish, in a form of cerebral atrophy. To me this was an unforeseen cost of going freelance.

The second thing was that in my old job, I was somewhat cushioned from the outside world. For example, I didn't have to buy stationery, I just went to the cupboard and found a pen sitting there when I needed it, usually just before I went into a meeting. I didn't have to worry about the corporate credit card being set up - it was already set up. I didn't have to worry about the coporate mobile phone. And even if I did have to worry about these things, I still had the power of my employer behind me, which meant I could phone up a dedicated helpline and get things sorted out with the seeming efficiency & importance that I thought I had, but was probably more likely due to the company I worked for. Now, the cushion has been removed and I am sitting on the cold, hard seats just like everybody else.

Those two factors compounded each other... Getting a fully working bank account should not take 12 weeks, but it did. I was flabbergasted. But it seems that's just "normal". That orders placed on the internet for business goods would either not appear, delivered to the wrong address or would be delivered despite leaving a calling card saying that I had to pick it up at the "local" depot (which turned out to be a 30 minute drive away) only to find out when I got there that they had already delivered the item to an different address and didn't have my signature.

All of this, perversly, gives me great hope. There is a great deal of opportunity out there for entrepreneurs willing to take on the morons and beat them... I, for one, will be a very loyal customer!