I am on disability benefits due to being mentalheaded.
What were you doing before the sabbatical?
I'm guessing not the best time to freelance, but what types of contracts are you potentially looking for?
Initially read that as metalheaded. I hope you're okay Drew. I have often wondered whether you are and checked you still had an online presence somewhere.
I'm fine! Not depressive or anything. Just incapable of leaving the house or really doing anything economically useful.
I'm on mastodon :|
I'm in my 10th (!) year at a small marcom company that formerly specialized in heavy industry/engineering clients, now with a more varied portfolio, but our main client that has supplied us with 70-80% of our billings is a huge fossil fuels support company (erk). I do some web design and development, server admin, odd jobs, and the go-to IT support person in the office.
I retired nearly 4 years ago after 30 years working first for The Inland Revenue as was, now HMRC, as a COBOL developer, then EDS (same but also setting up a change management team), then Fujitsu as an ISPF, TSO, MVS specialist with some DB2 support, then Capgemini as a DB2 DBA finally managing a DB2/Oracle/SQL Server/IDMS team which meant doing really interesting stuff for a while and then totally boring shit after that. I do stuff now, but not for money. Got a pension.
I'm a lead engineer in a service IT department working for a large (~1500 employees) charity, been there nearly two years now and enjoying it. It's a nice place to work, anyone can bring ideas to the fore and the IT department is around 80 people strong, so always others to bounce those ideas off. The past 4 weeks have been pretty hellish though. We been tasked with renting 800+ laptops and getting them configured for end users to be able to work from home. That in itself has been ok, but we've been supporting those end users through setting up VPN connections and have never been busier. Our job would be made a lot easier if people could read manuals.
When I'm not doing the above, the work is a bit of everything, 2nd and 3rd line support, projects, mentoring and coaching.
I would drop it all tomorrow though if drawing portraits paid the mortgage. :J
I work in the Cultural Institute of University of Leeds, mostly matching up artists with academics and giving them space and resources to play out together. I also still make my own art sometimes with Greyhair (Shanaz Gulzar).
Have you had a chance to play with the new toy yet?