The Slave Driver

Monday.

He wakes up at past 5 in the morning to carry on the tasks he was supposed to perform overnight. He finds less than 10 emails on his help desk software. This can be processed in less than an hour. However, times have changed for the raketship, and to compensate, our slave driver has commenced working for his day job 8 hours earlier than the time he was expected to go online. There is no supervisor checking. The clients abroad are spending their rest days. Might as well tweak the hours of being on the job so he can serve two masters at the same time.

The work schedule was different just a week ago. At this very hour, at 6:47 AM, one can find him in front of the laptop, rushing to add at least 15 units of work before the mandatory deadline at 8. With an entire week to write snippets - short descriptions about the services being offered by independent business owners - he only feels the crunch time on Sundays, when there's still over a hundred units of work to submit to the client.

These days, that over a hundred units of work have to be done before Tuesday midnight, to remain competitive, as 80 more writers will have to sink their nails and teeth and write as many snippets to earn their keep.

Thirty thousand work units, divided among freelance writers who used to deliver five hundred snippets every week. The first attempt may have ended in disarray; we still speculate how this affected the quality of production. But like in all organizations, the leadership will come up with ways for correction and make no mistake, we trust their wisdom. As for the writers like our slave driver, the choice is to adapt. This new work arrangement may turn him into a hermit for at least three days. But one thing we have discovered (and how joyful it is to find that there is so much to do outside of the two jobs) is that once the work units have run out, life at long last, says hello.