The Un-Unemployed

This is a piece I wrote for the Employment issue of the fantastic Pea Soup magazine. If you don't already, follow Pea Soup on Twitter and Like them on Facebook. 


THE Un-Unemployed

In a city that’s full of people moaning about their jobs, and others miserable because of a lack of one, spare a moment’s thought for those stuck in the middle who aren’t quite sure. The hermaphrodites of the employment world. Yep, we’re talking about you, freelancers...

But do they have double the burden or the best of both worlds? Pea Soup spends a week with a selection of London’s most prolific in a bid to separate the fact from the fiction.

We meet our first freelancer at 9 o’ clock on a Monday morning, promptly knocking on his door and secretly hoping to find him still in his pyjamas. After all, don’t freelancers always wear pyjamas? Well, apparently not. Freelance journalist Adam is awake, dressed and ready to head off to his place of work: the local Costa. On arrival he buys a coffee and heads instinctively to the far corner of the room, his reasoning becoming clear when we spot a plug for his laptop. It all seems very calm and civilised until it transpires that today the coffee shop’s wifi is as dodgy as its coffee, and his webmail account won’t load because it keeps timing out. It’s not so much the waste of precious work time which makes this a true freelance disaster, but the waste of a whole one hundred and ninety five precious pennies on a cup of watery liquid filth. This may sound like a bit of a first world problem, but as Adam puts it, “Living without Gmail is pretty much like living in the third world”. Well, quite.