INK blog

I used to get paid to pee. I also got paid to walk around my office, talk on the phone, surf the Web, do my expenses, stroll around the block, eat lunch and visit with my co-workers.

Now I don’t.

That has been one of the hardest things to which I have had to adjust now that I work for myself. No one pays me to go to the bathroom or lunch or, well, anywhere. If I am not producing actual, tangible stuff, I am not getting paid. Ick.

While charging by the hour does allow me to happily make round 83 of changes and answer my client’s phone call on Saturday night with a smile, it also means I am never really “off,” and there is no such thing as “downtime.”

I always loved downtime.

And I often find myself reaching the end of what I thought was a busy day and looking back to find my billable hours were minimal. What the hell did I do all day? It’s 9 pm, and I felt busy until that moment. And I earned, like, $1.50 all day. Ick, again.

A recent article in The Wall Street Journal talked about how self-employed people can’t take vacation. Sing it, sister. My past couple of “vacations” were really just changes of venue: I worked in a hotel room instead of in my apartment. Granted, I was so very happy to enjoy real theater at night while working in New York, where they mercifully make you turn off your cell phone for at least two hours. Of course, the rub continued: No one was paying me to see Hair (which I didn’t love, by the way).

And no one is paying me to write this post, which I am doing while watching a baseball game and a football game, answering e-mail and responding to a phone survey about the “Times Square-ization” of San Francisco (they wish!). This is my new downtime. So now I’ll just cross my legs and try to think of a way to make peeing billable.

To editors, superfluous apostrophes are a blot on the grammatical landscape. While apostrophes are necessary to indicate possession and construct contractions, please don’t use them willy-nilly. There are rules! And they are pretty easy to follow:

Do use an apostrophe with plurals of single letters: Mind your p’s and q’s. I got two A’s on my report card.

Do NOT use an apostrophe for plurals of multiple-letter combinations: The CEOs are meeting today. I gave her five IOUs.

Do NOT use an apostrophe for plurals of figures: There are four 727s in the fleet. The temperature is in the low 50s. The 1980s were filled with neon.

Ignore The New York Times’ incorrect use of an apostrophe in decades: It’s 1960s, not 1960’s, unless you are claiming ownership on behalf of that single year. I also suggest you ignore The Times’ crazy use of ’s after s (Times’s — no!). We all learned in elementary school that is just plain wrong.

And for the love of G-d, do NOT use an apostrophe to make a poor unsuspecting word plural. Just add the s, no apostrophe. Really.

To be specific: If you absolutely must put a sign on your house announcing your family name, don’t use an apostrophe: The Hauptmans, NOT The Hauptman’s (if you are feeling super-possessive, you may put an apostrophe AFTER the s, indicating the house belongs to the family — as in The Hauptmans’ House — but NEVER before).

P.S. Its is possessive: The posse lost its way. It’s is a contraction for it is: It’s now or never. Think of the apostrophe as a leftover from the dot of the i.

At long last, I have joined the blogosphere. I have vehemently avoided doing so until now, determined to evade the inherent responsibility and pressure. You must blog constantly and be fascinating all the time, I thought. But recently, as I was working with a client on her soon-to-be-published website and companion blog, I realized you can have a blog and post to it only when you feel like doing so: weekly, monthly, even yearly. No promises are required, I realized. I don’t have to be fascinating all the time — though it does give me the opportunity to be fascinating … sometimes, I hope. As wiser folks than I have said: “You gotta be in it to win it.” And as my sweet husband told me one year as we were watching the Academy Awards, and I was saying (whining) that I really, really wanted to win an award and give an acceptance speech: “But, honey, you weren’t in anything this year.”

Well, I’m in it.