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Day 2 of full-time freelancing
Morning: finish a cover, invoice, get paid. Woo!
Afternoon: AUGH ACCOUNTING IT TOOK SOOOOOOOO LONG
OK, part of the problem was that I had been neglecting it for a few months. Months that were mostly spending money and not making money, for the most part, so I didn't actually owe any sales tax (I sold stuff on Etsy, but it collects and remits the sales tax for me YAY). But there were quite a lot of frustrations, including...
1) my bank deciding that the feeds into my accounting program should include only the amount in the bank account, not the actual transactions. Which necessitated...
2) downloading a .csv file of the transaction to import into the accounting program. Which necessitated...
3) opening said .csv in Excel to check the types of columns the report had to get the settings in the import correct. Which necessitated...
4) BUYING OFFICE because I forgot I no longer had access to it from my former workplace. Yes, I could have opened the .csv in Google Sheets or even a textfile but given that the publishing industry runs on Word and I've got several Word docs with notes in them etc. etc. etc. I figured I'd go ahead and buy it anyway. Which necessitated...
5) Creating a new Microsoft account, which necessitated...
6) WRESTLING WITH THE WORST "VERIFY YOU ARE A HUMAN" TEST I HAVE EVER DEALT WITH IN MY ENTIRE LIFE (see below)
7) And then finally spending an hour and a half going through all my transactions, even the ones from Etsy which are FRUSTRATING because Etsy subtracts any random fees you owe from your balance before sending it to you, so if you sold a $3.99 item you not only get the normal Etsy fees removed from it, you get two random $ .20 re-listing fees from other things deducted before it's sent to you. JUST LET ME PAY THOSE SEPARATELY, ETSY. IT MAKES MY ACCOUNTING SO MUCH EASIER.
8) But everything is nicely accounted for now, and my accounts are reconciled all the way up to last week which is VERRA, VERRA NICE.
Anyway, if you want to shudder in horror at the worst verify-you-are-human test I've experienced yet...
I got partway through the Microsoft account setup and was confronted by a test in which you are shown a 3x2 grid of squares filled with blurry photos and scattered with teeny white icons, and you are asked to choose the box that has two identical icons. You have to do this EIGHT TIMES. After which, it then informed me I was going to have to do it again, because apparently I was not responding like a human. I did it again, and it told me I had to do the test AGAIN.
I figured hey, maybe the problem was my adblocker, which tends to affect things like that, so I took it off and reloaded the page, which then sent me back to the beginning to create the account. Sigh.
Confronted with the test again, I thought, maybe the problem was that I was a bit slow or got one wrong, so I took my time the third time through, only to be told at the end that I wasn't fast enough. WHAT
I did it a FOURTH time, as fast as I could, to be told that I had to do it YET AGAIN.
So I did what any reasonable person would do and told it to give me the audio version of the test.
The audio version of the test is that you have to listen to three 5-second-ish snippets of 8-bitlike electronic "songs"
and tell it which of the 3 changes instruments halfway through.
You have to do this EIGHT TIMES.
And sometimes the second "instrument" is almost identical to the first. Maybe others would hear it--some time ago I posted here about a YouTube video showing differences in music that I could not hear at all but which were blindingly obvious to some of y'all--but I couldn't, and had to randomly guess a couple of times. The only good thing is that I didn't have to redo the entire eight-song sequence when I got one wrong, it just had me do another one so I did 9 in total.
After all that I FINALLY got to pay them money for Office, and I clicked the "Please keep me logged in" button so fast it left skidmarks because I never want to have to do that damn test again. You'd think they'd want to make it easy to do that.
Upshot: I did not get to start on the next couple of covers like I wanted to, so they get started tomorrow morning (and I have to take the cat to the vet tomorrow afternoon, and have no idea how long it'll take, but we'll see).
Afternoon: AUGH ACCOUNTING IT TOOK SOOOOOOOO LONG
OK, part of the problem was that I had been neglecting it for a few months. Months that were mostly spending money and not making money, for the most part, so I didn't actually owe any sales tax (I sold stuff on Etsy, but it collects and remits the sales tax for me YAY). But there were quite a lot of frustrations, including...
1) my bank deciding that the feeds into my accounting program should include only the amount in the bank account, not the actual transactions. Which necessitated...
2) downloading a .csv file of the transaction to import into the accounting program. Which necessitated...
3) opening said .csv in Excel to check the types of columns the report had to get the settings in the import correct. Which necessitated...
4) BUYING OFFICE because I forgot I no longer had access to it from my former workplace. Yes, I could have opened the .csv in Google Sheets or even a textfile but given that the publishing industry runs on Word and I've got several Word docs with notes in them etc. etc. etc. I figured I'd go ahead and buy it anyway. Which necessitated...
5) Creating a new Microsoft account, which necessitated...
6) WRESTLING WITH THE WORST "VERIFY YOU ARE A HUMAN" TEST I HAVE EVER DEALT WITH IN MY ENTIRE LIFE (see below)
7) And then finally spending an hour and a half going through all my transactions, even the ones from Etsy which are FRUSTRATING because Etsy subtracts any random fees you owe from your balance before sending it to you, so if you sold a $3.99 item you not only get the normal Etsy fees removed from it, you get two random $ .20 re-listing fees from other things deducted before it's sent to you. JUST LET ME PAY THOSE SEPARATELY, ETSY. IT MAKES MY ACCOUNTING SO MUCH EASIER.
8) But everything is nicely accounted for now, and my accounts are reconciled all the way up to last week which is VERRA, VERRA NICE.
Anyway, if you want to shudder in horror at the worst verify-you-are-human test I've experienced yet...
I got partway through the Microsoft account setup and was confronted by a test in which you are shown a 3x2 grid of squares filled with blurry photos and scattered with teeny white icons, and you are asked to choose the box that has two identical icons. You have to do this EIGHT TIMES. After which, it then informed me I was going to have to do it again, because apparently I was not responding like a human. I did it again, and it told me I had to do the test AGAIN.
I figured hey, maybe the problem was my adblocker, which tends to affect things like that, so I took it off and reloaded the page, which then sent me back to the beginning to create the account. Sigh.
Confronted with the test again, I thought, maybe the problem was that I was a bit slow or got one wrong, so I took my time the third time through, only to be told at the end that I wasn't fast enough. WHAT
I did it a FOURTH time, as fast as I could, to be told that I had to do it YET AGAIN.
So I did what any reasonable person would do and told it to give me the audio version of the test.
The audio version of the test is that you have to listen to three 5-second-ish snippets of 8-bitlike electronic "songs"
and tell it which of the 3 changes instruments halfway through.
You have to do this EIGHT TIMES.
And sometimes the second "instrument" is almost identical to the first. Maybe others would hear it--some time ago I posted here about a YouTube video showing differences in music that I could not hear at all but which were blindingly obvious to some of y'all--but I couldn't, and had to randomly guess a couple of times. The only good thing is that I didn't have to redo the entire eight-song sequence when I got one wrong, it just had me do another one so I did 9 in total.
After all that I FINALLY got to pay them money for Office, and I clicked the "Please keep me logged in" button so fast it left skidmarks because I never want to have to do that damn test again. You'd think they'd want to make it easy to do that.
Upshot: I did not get to start on the next couple of covers like I wanted to, so they get started tomorrow morning (and I have to take the cat to the vet tomorrow afternoon, and have no idea how long it'll take, but we'll see).
no subject
I'm so sorry you're stuck with Microsoft. I hate Word myself (I used to use weird-ass solutions like Mariner Write and Mellel to draft in, if that gives you any idea) BUT Track Changes/Word is so ubiquitous in trad pub. I have never forgotten the horror story (I can't remember it was Cory Doctorow or Charlie Stross or something else whose name starts with a C) of someone who was doing edits on his trad pub novel in like OpenOffice or Google Docs or something, and there was a bug/error and it ATE THE FILE midway through. He bought Office and never looked back. :] Hopefully, having gone through STUPID MICROSOFT FUCKERY once, you never have to go through that again.
no subject
no subject