I suppose I should elaborate on my nasty post from Friday after receiving a couple of alarmed emails over the weekend.
The gist of the matter is I had two fairly big clients that were basically paying the freight here in Bako and last week I lost both of them. Truth be told, I lost them several weeks ago, I just didn't know it.
Now, I've lost work before because the client just didn't like me or the work. It happens occasionally and it's an occupational hazard and it's something you just deal with and move on. But that wasn't the case here in either instance.
In the first, I had half a dozen ongoing projects with the director of marketing for a large firm here in town. And then in late June, she stopped returning email. When I finally got ahold of her on her personal email account, she informed me she was on vacation and apologized for forgetting to inform me. Fair enough. But then she never seemed to return from vacation. When we finally spoke last week she informed me she had been laid off the last week of June and she had been too embarrassed to tell me. She had also evidently been too embarrassed to inform her former employer that I had been doing all their work for months. When I was finally able to contact someone in authority at the company last week and try and salvage the account, they said all the work had already been reassigned.
The second instance is even more convoluted and not worth the effort to type it out. Suffice it to say that when you find yourself working for husband and wife owners, it's always smart to make sure you're aligned with the spouse who will ultimately take control of the company when the other one suddenly files for divorce. So, even though they were extremely happy with the work, I'm collateral damage in a messy break-up simply because I worked for "her".
Now, I realized all along it was risky having all my eggs in just two baskets and for months I'd been trying to line up more local clients.
And that's when I ran into the Bako brick wall.
First of all, a lot of the larger companies here are branches of corporations or part of a chain or affiliated with regional or national networks. So all their marketing is done out of the area. Most of the rest are wedded to their existing situations through connections in the Rotary, or Chamber of Commerce, or PTA or church or... the list goes on and on. A lot of the work is handled by a nephew/daughter-in-law/fellow church Deacon who has a computer and a copy of PhotoShop.
All that's really left are some mom-and-pop operations and I've discovered that just isn't a viable option. One of the nicer restaurants approached me about completely redoing their look. New logo, new menus, new ads. It sounded like a great job and I estimated it would probably take 20 to 30 hours to give them a selection and produce final art. And then asked what their budget was.
$40.
Yes, it's cheaper to live here, but I'd be hard pressed to make it work on $40 a week.
So, at the end of the day, I'm finding the opportunities here are just nonexistent.
Which is why the hunt for work has moved back to the city. Any city.
The boyfriend supports me because he's miserable here too. What we would do with the house we haven't decided. We bought it below market (which is saying something here) and we've fixed it up enough that we can probably break even. We thought about renting it out, but we've seen what the barbarians have done to some of the other rental homes in the neighborhood and that seems like it's not worth the effort. But the bottom line is we are back to "Plan A" - getting the hell out of Bakersfield.
It's not like I didn't give it a fighting chance here.
