#and b) idk where jts legal to do that here and with my luck the first person to stop will be a cop

[horce-divorce]

I hate you AI tech startups I hate you Gig economy i hate you Rev dot com. "A new era of productivity is coming->" yeah ass hole i KNOW. it's you giving all my work to fuckign robots and then paying me pennies on the dollar to proofread it when I spent TEN! YEARS! BEING your stupid AI and doing a better job and honing my skills AND FOR WHAT. Now what!!!! Now if I wanted to use my skills I'd have to be conventionally employed, which defeats the WHOLE ENTIRE PURPOSE OF HAVING DONE IT ON MY OWN. FOR 10 YEARS.

FOR context. I'm a transcriptionist and even though the gig economy as a whole is hot wet garbage, for the last 10 years or so you could still at least make minimum wage freelancing transcription- sometimes even twice that if I had a good workflow down and good stuff in the queue.

Freelancing is CRUCIAL to my wellbeing because with my symptoms I cannot commit to regular employment. Being able to take only the jobs I want, and work on them at fully my own pace- like, even if I need to step away from the computer to lay on the floor/scream/etc- was literally the only reason this type of work was even feasible for me. This was HOW I managed to stay afloat for the last 10 years of being homeless, even if only just.

5-6 years ago, the peak times for files were the same. I could log on at pretty consistent times of the week and be guaranteed to have work in the queue to choose from. Sometimes getting GOOD files was competitive, and it was much harder to get them when everyone else was trawling the queue (usually after standard business hours & weekends, because a lot of people did this as a side gig), but if you could log on when the other freelancers were at their primary jobs, you'd pretty much always have work to choose from. If you didnt, it would only be a few days before the queue picked up again. The only times that wasn't true were during PEAK activity- during the holidays when everyone's not at their primary job and are hustling trying to get extra cash.

This was MY JOB. This is my fucking job, the one I actually put all my skill stats into. Once I was too disabled to be employed, this was the ONLY thing I could do, other than sell art. For TEN YEARS this was enough to get me the pocket money I needed for meds or to cover food here and there, i wasn't self sufficient but it was enough that I didn't have to beg for meds every week.

I would love to not be reblogging my begging posts so much but we are literally almost out of meds and it is very, very bad if we run out, I know this bc it happens all the fucking time because I could BARELY manage to survive as 1 person on my freelance money. Now there's 2 of us and my freelance money has been cut by idek what percentage. One year I made $2,000 freelancing, this YTD I've made $77.99. One month. One fucking month I managed to grab any files and it was like 4 of them. That's it. That's my YEAR'S income so far.

I WANT to be able to work. I fucking miss having money. I miss the dignity of a job well done and a paycheck to show for it. I miss being able to buy the shit I need with like 3 or 4 hours of labor instead of begging for help for a whole fucking week and getting even less. I never really made enough money to have expendable income even when I had 3 jobs, but at least not having to beg for it was something.

Anyway I fucking hate this, I'd love to be able to hop on, grab a file, and know ill be able to buy meds on Monday. But I don't have that now and if we don't beg we don't get what we need, period. I only have about $5 worth of cans to return rn. We don't have another way.