Potboiler

potboiler: a usually inferior work (as of art or literature) produced chiefly for profit.

Merriam-Webster Online dictionary

The potboiler is an expedient device of the for-profit writerly crowd. Need new retreads on the family bus? Scribble out a top-of-the-skull article about retreads and sell it to Wheelies Weekly. Finally decided on electrolysis for that unfeminine moustache? Pound out a quick tearjerker for Lady's Housebound Companion. Not all boiling pots are necessarily substandard. I've read somewhere (see? A potboiler, by definition, requires no research) that Charles Dickens cranked out A Christmas Carol strictly for the pounds sterling opportunity. It seems to have stood up pretty well over the years. (Should pounds sterling be capitalized? Who cares? This is a potboiler.)

But I'm not writing my potboiler with the expectation of grabbing a few quick greenbacks since nobody is paying me to write. Some, I suspect, would pay me not to write. My income comes in from my day job. That particular endeavor is currently demanding ten-hour days at seven days per week and I still have a self-imposed article deadline to meet. Hence this caldron bubbler.

In real life I'm one of those much-discussed "temporary" workers. I'm paid by the hour. If I don't work an hour I don't get paid for that hour. If I work overtime I get paid once and a half for that hour. I've been doing this for 28 years. By choice. I'm a job-shopper. That's old politically incorrect terminology. Today's image conscious industry prefers "Contract Technical Employee." When I'm not profitably engaged as a Technical Writer for some corporate entity or another keyboarding repair manuals or operation manuals or software user manuals I'm able to earn tuna for my Tuna Helper by toiling as a Logistics Engineering Analyst (don't even ask).

So churning out this dross allows me to meet my self-imposed article deadline while pursuing those tasty overtime paychecks. And it also gives me an opportunity to pause in my endless parade of negative articles that our politicians and bureaucrats and other un-libertarian anti-freedom dolts so richly deserve and write something positive like:

Capitalism is alive and well and living in America.

We just have to look a little harder for it than we ought to. Job-shopping delivers me from corporate politics, offers a sense of freedom and accomplishment, and pays better than the traditional nine-to-five gig. It begins by papering the country with resumes. A company gets a big project rolling and can't find enough bodies to fill all the slots. So they call a job shop -- oops, a Contract Engineering Service Provider -- who sucks my resume out of their hard drive and calls me. We negotiate on the phone: where, how much, when, how much, what kind of a job, how much? A brief chat with the client's manager usually means I'm hired. Then I pack the vilified SUV and Mary and I roll down the road.

The name of this game is mobility, adaptability and diversity. I've worked East Coast and West Coast, North and South (mobility) and am currently chalking up assignment number twelve in the Dallas/Fort Worth SuperMegaMetroPlex. One job lasted five plus years. One died after two months. I've been laid off with a fifteen minute notice. (Adaptability.) But I've been able to transition through four different careers, starting as a drafter and then falling into technical illustrating then lucking into tech writing and then stumbling into (that esoteric discipline again) logistics engineering (diversity), something I never could have done as a direct employee (we call you folks "captives").

My goal was never to have a career. The career was just a means to other ends. Job assignments are working vacations. I've stood atop Sandia Mountain overlooking Albuquerque, trod the boardwalk at Atlantic City, ice skated in Minnesota and rode horses in Texas. Being a job-shopper means a degree of freedom that I never could have had as a full time employee with the same old corporation. Security? Security is knowing that I can walk into a new company in a new city a thousand miles away and do the job. Security is a state of mind. Maybe it just comes naturally. I grew up traveling on carnivals every summer from birth until I was eighteen. But that's another potboiler.

And that's freedom. And that's capitalism.

Now all I need is one more word as counted by my Microsoft Word word counter to reach my self-imposed limit of 750 and turn off the burner under the pot.

There.