Working for Free...

I would like to say that this weekend was pretty good. Not only did the weekend go well, I also have no inkling as to what is awaiting for me tomorrow AM when I return to work. I am a Logmein.com user and when I signed off of my PC Thursday PM, I thought I was rebooting my PC. Well, apparently, someone turned off my PC b/c I cannot log onto my PC - it says it is "Offline." Which is great. It's fantastic.

Why?

I would do work for free tonight for my employer. I would log on to my PC and do work and then not log those hours as hours I worked. What do I do when I log onto my PC? Check e-mail messages for things that come up. Thursday PM, a Support rep couldn't find information about something so I, quickly, located it and replied back with a link to where the information she was seeking is located.

Simple requests get my attention. "Can you add "The sky is blue" to the "Item File Maintenance" topic?" Sure. It's 10-15 minutes and I make my reader happy.

Yet... I am working for free. Free. As in "I'll do the work and you don't have to compensate me for my time." Free.

How freaking stupid is that?!?

I have to stop.

And the funny thing is ... I've said this before. In the early days of working @ this company, I would explore the Internet and download WinHelp files, on my own time, decompile them, on my own time, and inspect their .hpj file, on my own time, to figure out what that Tech Writer did to get their WinHelp file to do whatever functionality had captured my interest. Early on, it was the CB macro, which would create a user-defined button that could go anywhere, that captured my attention. Then, it was adding menu options to the right-click menu.

Then, it was the fact that I could have a single file with all these startup macros stored and by adding or removing a line and recompiling all the WinHelp files, I could ripple my changes through all my projects. But even before that, it was figuring out how to write a DOS batch file and compiling all my projects without ever opening my Help Authoring Tool (HAT).

All these things I would explore and figure out on my own, sitting at my PC in my den, and relishing as I expanded my knowledge. I became a WinHelp guru and one of the last to leave the format. I remember one day posting that as much as I loved the format, I was no longer going to write WinHelp files. I had joined the HTML revolution.

And even with HTML, I am in the midst of learning. And learning. I got turned on to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and am now in the midst of converting from a layout that uses tables to control formatting to using CSS to control my formatting. It is a strange new world. I've learned about how to add color and depth to various tags and laughed myself silly as I watched the changes to a single line impact over 1000 HTML files.

But even with all that, it is hard for me to distinguish between work and play, between work for which I should receive compensation for and work that is for my own knowledge.

I think it boils down to this: I cannot work for my employer for free any longer. If I log onto my PC, I need to track that time. Period.

Writing that may seem like common sense, but it feels like a boulder off my shoulder...