Anywhere Doug and I go is guaranteed to be interesting.  We seem to attract odd people and events like magnets of blood and bone.  Last late summer around this time was certainly no exception.

Spurred on by a need to imbibe vast quantities of alcohol, as usual, we decided to take a Sunday drive one day and stop by Peller Estates.  Peller Estates is one of the premier producers of wine in the Niagara region, even though last year they had to buy a shiteload of their grapes from South America because the crops were so horrid for 2006 and 2007.  This hardly affected the quality of the wine, merely its carbon footprint.

We signed up for a wine tour and tasting, with a wine and food pairing class to follow with one of the employees of the winery.  As it has been a while I can’t remember the poor man’s title, but it was something equivalent to brewmaster.  We went on the tour and it was quite informative; we learned how to “chuff” wine.  I almost lost my cookies when the tour guide started chuffing, until I realized that it was “OK” - amazing what socialization will do.  Chuffing involves essentially gargling the wine at the back of your throat to get the full flavour.  Wine enthusiasts are probably passing out from the simplicity of that explanation; to pacify them I will say that there is probably more to it than that.

The lady from the front desk came striding down the stairs on a mission.  That mission was to get us away from the tour group and send us up to our classroom, pronto.  We asked her if it was starting early, as we had thought that it was timed to start with the end of the tour.  She smiled blankly and just begged us to come upstairs.  We deduced later that the instructor must have hit the panic button under the boardroom table and this was her answer to it.

We walked into the room and there were wineglasses set up for us, each for a different type of wine.  There were also little plates of appetizers, each containing different combination of meats and cheeses.  There was a very scared looking instructor, and only one other couple.  The couple, of course, is why I am writing this for you, my eager readers.

The woman was stunning.  I don’t mean that kind of airbrushed stunning that you see in a magazine, but that real life, flesh and blood stunning that makes women like her extremely rare jewels.  She was casually dressed in an informal outfit - not jeans and a t-shirt but not over the top either.  Her hair and makeup were perfectly done.

The guy was a different story.  Tall and lanky, this guy got more than a few wedgies in high school.  Heck, we wanted to give him one about ten minutes after meeting him.  Outspoken and strident, to look at them you would think that there was no way the guy could have netted this lady unless he was a porn star.

We reserved judgment, made small talk, and I noticed that the lady had an accent.  I asked her what her background was and she said that she had recently immigrated from Russia, with a furtive glance at her husband.  That’s when the sun dawned on both of our little mental beaches - she was a mail order bride.

What ensued could have been a Mad TV or SNL skit, only I don’t think that they could have made this shit up.  The instructor, who was very low key and unpretentious, found himself having to deal with multiple outbursts from the lanky weirdo, who claimed to know one of the Peller kids.  The instructor asked him which one and he gave a name that the instructor had never heard of.  The instructor wrote it off to “Peller” being a common name, but you could tell he was trying to put the smackdown on this pretentious git.  He then went on about making his own wine on the balcony of his condo in Toronto, and essentially took over the conversation from there.  All the while he was twirling his Masonic ring, which we had been informed belonged to his father, who was “quite high up” in the organization.  I have never in my life met someone so keen to impress people.

When his lovely wife upstaged him with a rare remark, he essentially told her to be quiet.  This wasn’t one of those “be quiet honey, you shouldn’t really be telling anyone about that mole on my nutsack” sort of quiet, it was more the “be quiet or I’ll ship you back to Russia, you good for nothing whore” kind of be quiet.

The instructor rushed through the session as quickly as possible to just get them out of the room.  I’m sure we learned many wondrous things that day, such as the fact that wine goes with whatever you want it to go with and the traditional pairings of white with chicken and fish and red with steak had been tossed out aeons ago.    Mr. Wannabe Mason didn’t like that piece of advice at all - he had brought his mail order wife to that class so that they would look very educated and cool at the dinner parties that they probably held for his loud, obnoxious friends and he wanted to know what went with what, goddamit.  He actually resorted to picking up each wine and asking the instructor to tell him what he would serve with it - I believe the wife was writing it down.  It was a pity because the whole point of the class was how to enjoy wine with food, not how to classify wine with food.  We got it, and have since applied the lesson generously.

When we left we waited until they left the room, then the instructor left, then us.  I tapped the instructor on the shoulder and said “were you thinking what we were thinking” and he looked at me and said “hell, yes.”  We had a good laugh and he talked to us for a further 10-15 minutes about his job and the estate, and we shook hands and parted ways in bemusement over our shared experience.

The moral here?  Guys, if you have to do the mail order bride thing, don’t treat her like one in public.  It’s extremely creepy and not to mention disrespectful to her.  I wanted to grab the poor thing and enroll her in a Woman’s Studies course at the University of Toronto just so she could get more of a sense that she didn’t have to sit there and take that, regardless of how she got over here.  I guess that the message for mail order brides is that if the guy you married is an asshole in general when you get here, you don’t owe him jack.  Nothing.  Leave, and go to a halfway house where he can’t find you.  The way most of you look you will have no trouble getting a job anywhere, in this lady’s case she could have been a supermodel.  I may not have been able to help her, but I’m hoping someone reads this who is in a similar situation and it gives them the gumption to get out.  It may have been funny, but it was also very sad.

I’m sure she’s not allowed to chuff.

Posted: September 4th, 2008 under Anarchy, Food & Drink.
Comments: none

I had a really interesting conversation today with the CEO of Elance, Fabio Rosati.  Seems like my initial article on the subject hit his Google Alerts list scant minutes within my posting of it, and I believe from my stats that he is probably one of about five people who read it.  His call inspired me to write this article to explain myself a little further and qualify a few of my statements.

He doesn’t usually call service providers out of the blue, but my article prompted him to do so.  He was concerned about what I perceived as the lack of quality buyers on his site, and my comments on the payment structure.  I found it touching that he actually cared enough to pick up the phone in these heady days of e-mails sent with thumbs from a BlackBerry.

I didn’t really have a lot of concerns with the Elance site itself, I believe it is being run as best as it can be.  The commissions drawn from each provider are probably necessary – however I am still sticking to my theory that $100.00 on a $1000.00 job (or close to – the actual number is more like $87.50, with only 6% being for Elance and 2.5% for payment providers - I should qualify this as I did call it profit-taking, and it may not be so) is not a cost I would have spent in the offline world to land that $1000.00 job.  There are simply too many jobs out there advertised on free job sites that are available.

I am planning on running a marketing campaign this fall in which I will be designing my own brochure and upgrading my website to a website rather than a blog layout.  Let’s be totally honest here – not everyone in the world can design a print brochure, design and code a website, and write impeccable content for it.  In the real world, you would probably have to pay a lot of money for one of those three things.  I would say I was lucky, but it took long years of hard lessons and experience to get me here so I can’t.

In the real world, where you would have to pay a lot of money for one or two of these items, being a web designer, a graphic designer, or a writer on its own instead of all three wrapped up into one, Elance would be a fabulous investment.  For me, because I can do these things, I am looking at the costs and saying that I can do better.

Yes, my award rates are lower, resulting in more time spent soliciting jobs.  Once I get those jobs though, my slate tends to fill up quickly and I don’t have time to do anything else anyway.  I want to make it clear that I am the exception rather than the rule.  That is in no way meant to be egotistical, just a statement of fact.

Fabio has a real concern about people perceiving his site as of a lower quality, and really wants to stand out from the crowd as a higher quality site.  Elance is backing this up with a few initiatives, such as advertising to American Express small business customers.  Since I am planning on taking my marketing offline as well, I heartily approve of this move.  I would prefer to work with a “bricks and mortar” business, even an online-only one, than an internet marketer looking to make a few quick bucks.  There is no such thing as easy money, even in these wild west frontier days of the internet.

There will, however, always be a call for good content and proper copywriting on the internet.  I see this market as only growing in scope as search engines become more and more sophisticated in their content rating and ranking systems.  There will come a day, and some will argue that it is already here, when writing an article to game a search engine will be an internet marketer’s virtual death knell in Google’s SERPS (search engine results pages – you’re welcome).

I see freelance writers eventually falling into three distinct classes, or a caste system if you will allow the politically incorrect but accurate reference.  There are the professionally educated and trained, or what I call the executive class.  These are the wordsmiths that everyone is seeking to hire, and that do not come cheap.  Elance is for them a launching point to build a portfolio, and will only retain their attention if it offers them perks.  For example; if you have a consistent feedback rating of 4.5% or above for six months to a year, your commissions are cut by 50% and/or you are given a special ranking that makes you more recognizable to buyers as a quality provider.

The second class, (we’ll call them the white collar crowd), will be happy grinding it out for an average income of about $25,000 a year.  Elance in its current form will be their bread and butter.  These proles will be the backbone of sites like Elance and will deliver exactly what the customer asks for, nothing more and nothing less.  They will not stoop to write articles cheaply for peanuts, nor will they reach for anything beyond the boundaries of Elance.  These are the people that Elance needs to keep, and can probably do so with something resembling a bonus system – deliver so many projects in a certain amount of time, receive a refund of 2% on those projects, or something similar.

There will then be the underclass, or what both buyers and Elance consider the untouchables.  This class of person will be happy to write scads of poor quality content for 1.00 per article, thus diluting not only Elance itself, but the internet at large.  They will attract unscrupulous buyers, which can in turn destroy Elance’s reputation as a quality marketplace.  They will be poorly trained and will regard the art of writing as a chore to be likened to cooking fries at McDonald’s.

The real question, that nobody wants to ask, is how to keep the underclass out of the marketplace?  Can you?  Am I evoking too much Ayn Rand for my leftist soul and therefore feeling whorish at the moment?

The only thing that can possibly be done is to allow providers with a demonstrated ability represented by projects completed, feedback received, or some other criteria to enter into a more private area of the site, or even another site on its own, where only vetted buyers who are posting projects that meet certain criteria are allowed.  An inner sanctum would be VERY desirable to buyers, and they may police their own behavior in order to gain access to it.  Providers, in turn, may do the same.  Elance Elite, if you will.  While I can see the idea being controversial at first, eventually it would be embraced by both provider and buyer alike and copied by other sites.

Posted: August 29th, 2008 under Work & Career.
Comments: none

When I first began as a freelance writer, Elance was a good starting point.  It let me build a reputation, showcase feedback, and get jobs for a relatively low investment of 20.00 a month and a certain percentage of each job.  Now that I’ve been at it for a few months, I’ve discovered a few other places to find jobs that don’t cost money to apply to, and I’m definitely skewing towards getting jobs on my own through my own marketing rather than going off of Elance. 

My problem with Elance is not the quality of jobs or the quantity, but the fact that they take a commission on top of the membership fee.  If I am doing a $800.00 job, I am paying Elance $80.00 for the privilege.  To me this is a little steep.  I would think that the membership fees are enough to keep the site afloat and pay for everything, the commissions seem unnecessary and profit-taking.  Odesk, by contrast, only takes a commission and does not take any membership fees.  While I am not 100% in love with the Odesk software, I can’t help but admit it is a transparent way to work for the buyer that may just give them an extra measure of confidence.  That being said, the pool of decently paying gigs on Odesk is very small compared to Elance.    

I have found the quality of jobs to be rapidly declining on Elance, especially over the past 2 months or so.  This may be because everyone is on vacation, but I am concerned that it may represent a long term trend of people seeking $5.00 articles that take 2 hours to write and research.  While we do live in a free market economy, I’d rather let those willing to do this work for so little cash bid and stay out of the pool.

It’s also not very hard to find job boards and sites that offer jobs for freelance writers.  All you need to do is a few simple internet searches and you are hooked up. 

I have downgraded to the free membership on Elance and will be experimenting with my own online and offline marketing campaigns through brochures and data mining.  I’ll post an update on my ROI if I have time – I already shouldn’t be writing this article!

Just to be fair to Odesk, I thought I’d take a look at it today and see if it has improved/declined in the quality of the jobs.  It has tanked harder than Elance.  It isn’t uncommon to see ads like this one:  “$30.00 for 28 posts”.  I think I just completely ruled out ever using Odesk again - I’ll check back in a few months to see if the quality has spiked, but I doubt that will happen.  

Posted: August 26th, 2008 under Internet Marketing & Advertising, Work & Career.
Comments: none

This is a fun little meme, as well as being a bit accurate in my case.

Go to Google and type in quotation marks your name and then “likes to” (ex. “Tom likes to”). Type in the first ten things that come up and repost in your own note.

Angela likes to wear bandanas while playing

Angela likes to read various pieces on liturgy

Angela likes to write, watch movies and hang out with friends and family

Angela likes to dance

Angela likes to say to people ‘If I can do this, I believe anyone can.

Angela likes to accept challenges both professionally and personally.

Angela likes to sing the sweet role of Michaela

Angela likes to use a label maker like the Brother P-touch 1000

Angela likes to play video games

Angela likes to discover new things

Posted: August 24th, 2008 under Anarchy.
Comments: 1