I visited my high school for the first time in eight years, this time to see students perform the ten-minute play I submitted for the school’s one-act festival.

I just learned the term “permatemping.” It refers to a worker hired through a temp agency or as a contractor but who works on an indefinite basis, often onsite, often on a W2, like an employee. It sounds to me like a losing proposition for the employee. You give up the advantages of temp, consulting, and employee work while realizing all of the disadvantages.

Employees typically get benefits – health insurance, shuttle buses, and employer-sponsored social and professional development opportunities. Though they may be employed at will, the assumption is that employees can make plans that rely on working with the company for the long-term. Permatemps are excluded from all that.

Consultants, contractors, and freelancers trade off those benefits for flexibility, variety, and higher rates. They usually control their hours, pick their projects, and serve multiple clients. They may be reimbursed for travel time. They can write off expenses that employees can’t, including transportation to work and some business attire. They can also write off the premiums for the private health insurance their customers don’t provide. Again, not so for permatemps.

The permatemping phenomenon even diminishes the advantages of old-fashioned temping. Jobs that were previously temp-to-hire become permatemp instead. There is less freedom for temps to take time off and move from assignment to assignment over the course of the year; agencies are moving away from providing that kind of staff because servicing permatemp customers lets them stay on autopilot.

My suggestion for avoiding this pitfall? If you want to be matched with a tough-to-find opportunity, work with a recruiter, who earns a commission or fee for matching you rather than earning a percentage of your hourly labor. If you just need to find a relatively routine gig, cut out the middle man. Supplement your personal networking with the same sourcing venues the agencies use: comb Linkedin for companies and contacts.

A final thought: These agencies’ cut is about a third of what they bill the customer – forever. You can probably hire a professional to polish your resume and Linkedin profile for under $1,000.

A writing advice site I visited suggested that informational writing (writing articles) doesn’t pay. The post was a plea for writers to avoid the temptation of writing for content mills. I agree that writing 500-word blog posts for $25 is no way to make a living. However any kind of writing can pay well provided you pick the right customer. It can get confusing:

The lowest-paying work is correspondence and filler copy. If what you write is for one-time use, the entity who commissions your work can’t afford to pay much. Examples: short articles meant to drive SEO, ongoing low-stakes ghostwriting, like the “president’s statement” for a weekly nonprofit newsletter. A lot of this work isn’t assigned to freelance writers at all; it’s delegated to administrative employees.

Leveraged copy pays a bit more. I currently write fact sheets that are used by a company’s reps as leave behinds for sales calls. The company can’t measure a direct ROI for these pieces, but each one hypothetically contributes to tens of thousands of dollars in sales. This work commands a respectable hourly rate.

What pays the most? Direct response copy that generates revenue that can be measured, marketable entertainment copy like journalism or fiction from name writers, educational or informational copy sold to people who need the information.

Be strategic: If you love informational writing, you don’t have to grit your teeth and write junk … er, direct mail. Consider positioning yourself as a teacher and developing a product. Understand that your customers are students or sponsoring entities that enroll students. Or produce white papers for large corporations and skip trying to sell blog content to strapped small business owners.

I’m half amused, half bitter when I hear a person in software refer to “users in the wild.” From inside the zoo, a natural habitat is the wild. If you live out there, it’s just, well, home.

Long before I got paid for writing, I spent my time writing at work. I relished my time answering “too many” emails with unnecessarily thoughtful responses. I wrote treatises when memos would have sufficed. I followed up on meetings and conversations with tirades I should have saved for my journal. I know I’m not the only one. Born managers reorganize systems when their job is just to file. Natural counselors drift away from their desks to coach coworkers over lunch or coffee.

The trick is not necessarily to find a job that has the same title as the one you’d use to label your passion. It’s simply to find something that doesn’t leave you playing mental tug-of-war between what you’re expected to do and what you are compelled to do.

Sometimes being my own IT person kinda sucks.

A big-box office retailer that shall remain nameless has a big sign: $50 dollars off on select [weasel word!] printers costing $199 or more when you recycle your old printer. On the bottom of the sign are logos for Brother, HP, Canon, Epson, and Lexmark.

I ask the tech guy for a recommendation, and he suggests I go with a $199 HP LaserJet. It prints only in black & white, but he says part of the reason color printers break so often is that when you don’t use the color much, the ink dries out and damages the print head.

We go to ring it up, and the discount SKU doesn’t work. He calls the manager over, and he tries several different codes. He walks out and looks at the sign, confirms that I should get $50 off, and tries again.

You know what’s coming.

In fine print, the discount flyer the sales clerks use at the register say that Brother, Canon, Epson, and Lexmark printers are $50 off for a $199 printer. HP printers: $299! Not even $249, which would at least let you get the presumably better HP printer for the price of the lesser, cheaper brands.

The original clerk, who is also the install guy, takes me back to look at the $199 printers but says people have much more trouble with the software, use, install, etc. on the other brands because HP’s software is much better. (He seemed honest, and they’d have to have serious con man training to have developed a fake discount-upsell routine so elaborate.)

So, I spent more than I intended to. I hope this damned printer will last!

I did not travel to see family this holiday week, so I’m hanging around in my usual neighborhoods, looking for things to do and places to dine with my friends. With so many shops and restaurants closed at unusual times, businesses with long holiday hours had a great opportunity to make money picking up the slack, and even to gain new regulars or fans.

Unfortunately many businesses lost this opportunity. Some simple tips:

1. Put your phone number on a prominent place on your home page. This is a good idea year round: many prospective customers can call you with a tap to a mobile phone screen. During the holidays, there are probably people roaming around near your storefront whose original destination was unexpectedly closed.

2. Make a special Web banner or post about your holiday hours. On Christmas Eve, I wanted to eat at my favorite local restaurant. The phone message had not changed; it gave only their regular hours. Nothing on the Web site about holiday hours either. If they were open, they lost me. If not, they annoyed me.

3. The holidays are a great time to offer promotions. Publicize these on your Web site. These don’t have to be expensive. Develop co-branded offerings with other businesses that are close or simply post reciprocal banners like, “Shopping all day? Tired feet? Get 10% off of a reflexology massage at MyHappyBody between December 23 and January 1st with $100 purchase from ShoesShoesShoes.” and “$10 off your purchase at ShoesShoesShoes with a receipt from any spa service at MyHappyBody the same day.”

Just a little forethought can make for a more prosperous year’s end.

My blog is feeling lonely, as my efforts have been diverted to ghost blogging in a very different kind of venue, feeding a big content-hungry monster.

A byline would be nice, but I guess that will come!

Just enjoyed a really fun linguistic thread on Facebook with some old-school Deadheads.

Once upon a time, there were no texts and cell phones. If you wanted to meet up with someone at a general admission concert, you had to make a plan to find your way to a particular location within a relatively specific timeframe.

At Dead shows, there were a few general location indicators, among them “at the rail,” “near the Spinners,” “with the Wharf Rats at set break,” and “on the Jerry side” (stage left) or “on the Phil side” (stage right.)

In Furthur shows now, Jerry Garcia’s lead guitar job is occupied by John Kadlecik, and for a time, he and Phil switched sides.

Consensus: “Jerry’s side will always be Jerry’s side.”

Is everyone creative? The debate rages. Let’s stipulate that everyone is … or can be.

So, why do companies have trouble getting employees to be “creative,” and why do so many people feel stifled at work?

One model of the creative process suggests that there are 4 stages:
1. Preparation
2. Incubation
3. Illumination
4. Implementation

To my observation, most companies (and many creativity consultants) attempt to push people from stage #1 right to stage #3. The popular technique of brainstorming is a prime example. When a group brainstorms, people throw out ideas without censoring them, and capture them in the hopes that the process will produce rough gems that can be mined for value forthwith.

Contrast that to the idiosyncratic processes employed by productive creative people from artists to entrepreneurs to programmers. After deciding to tackle the project or possibility and before spitting out ideas and proposals, they let things percolate. They get up from the desk and go for a run. They bake. They take naps. They temporarily detach themselves from the problem at hand. Typically they spend some time in solitude. They relax their time frame for coming up with that Great Idea.

Want to help your people be more creative? Shred those copies of Never Eat Alone.