I found that the best type of work for me is work I can do online from wherever we travel. The work I do with RVillage is perfect since it’s only 15 hours a week and can be done mostly any time of the day. I usually tried to work 3.75 hours a day 4 days a week but if I needed other days off I’d just increase the per day hours. I still feel blessed to have this job even though right now the number of hours I work each week is very little. It should pick back up soon so between now and then I decided to see what else is out there as far as a “virtual” job is concerned.
Two websites that I know of featuring these types of jobs are oDesk.com and Elance.com. I’ve
signed up with both, completed my profile and searched for jobs. There are some things that I’ve learned during this process that I’m going to share.
First is that at least half the jobs online pay as little as $1-2 per hour. This may sound odd to us until you consider that the jobs are open to people around the world. In the Philippines $2 an hour is top pay and most of these jobs go to people in countries like that. Americans can’t live on that low rate of pay. On these websites you see feedback from people who have worked for the company and what they thought about working for them. it also shows their total pay and how many hours they worked. Most of them show a days work for $8. After having applied for some of these jobs and finally figuring it all out, I stopped pursuing those. People from other countries can apply for any job, even the higher paying jobs. Because of this there are not a whole lot of jobs paying more than $8-$10 per hour. Most of the jobs require that you state how much you are willing to do the job for so there’s always a mixture of $1-2 per hour bidders for any job.
Since I originally heard about RVillage through Workamper.com and Workamper.com is an extremely reputable RVer employment company I never had any doubts about the interview process with RVillage. Other companies on these sites are totally unknown and there is much to be leery about. They have a wide range of ways they use to see if you qualify for their open position. One very unique process I went through asked the applicant to do the following:
-Download a zipped file with directions.
-First direction was to go to a specific web address which they provided to the Gettysburg address. Find the word brave and using that as word 1 and the following word men as word 2 go to what would be word 10. Go to the 7th letter in word 10. Assign a number value to that letter as it would be where A=1, B=2 and so on. My letter was R so it was = 18.
-Next go to a video on a different web page where several actors read parts of the Declaration of Independence. You were to first Google the actor Edward Nelson and familiarize yourself with him so that when you see him in the video you will know it. Of course I thought two of the actors was him so I had to work a little harder to narrow it down! Once I came to him I was to skip the first time he talked by himself. The second time he talked I was to find the 18th word (because my R equaled 18. This required me listening a couple of time and then writing down each word he said and figuring out that the word was “the”.
-Next you went to a different website and after the web address:xxx.xxxxxxx.xx/ you were to insert your word. If and only if you had done each part of it perfectly would you access the webpage with the next step in the process. I did it an was terribly proud of myself!
=The next step was to post a youtube video of myself talking for 30-60 minutes about what wonderful things I could do for his company. Once you post it on youtube and send him the url to it he’ll let you know if he wants to interview you. I didn’t create a video and that’s where I am now, not really sure I want to go that far. This is the only job process I’ve come across like this one.
It looks like these weird processes are used to see how detail oriented you are and how willing you are to stick something out.
The other, not so wild, process I did was to download a zipped file containing a Word document and a photograph. I had to take those and put them in to a WordPress blog. What you are reading is a WordPress blog and of course I know how to use Word and work with photographs. I did what they asked which was to copy and paste the words from document into the blog, formatting the words by bolding specific ones and making sure spacing was correct, add the photo resized to 500 x 200 from a much larger size and center it. That sounded easy enough as this is exactly how I do a lot of my blogs, so I did it.
Only problem was that the grammar and a lot of things about the document wording were quite, quite bad. One thing you always have to keep in mind on these virtual job websites is that since foreigners are sometimes writing the job posting their English writing is very odd so what we might immediately think as suspicious here may possibly be the translation to English so I’ve had to overlook some of that. I don’t think this was the case with this document, however. I actually think the article needed to be taken apart and put back together in a way that provided some continuity and having a lot of spellings and grammar corrected. I did what I could without totally redoing the article even though that was never mentioned in the instructions. I’m thinking they may want to see if you’d catch that.
I submitted my proposal for this one (that’s what they call your application which also includes you telling them the lowest price you will do the work for – another oddity) and explained that I corrected as much as I comfortably could change in the document without totally redoing it. Haven’t heard back from them yet!
The next blog will be about a job application process I’m in that I truly believe is an employment scam. I haven’t found another job yet but my days are filled with going through the many different processes these people put you through and it’s opening my employment seeking eyes quite a bit.
We had a family tour our house earlier this week week and it rained before they came for the first time in two weeks. I water every other day but can’t reach many plants who have been pitifully sagging so we just knew the rain was God’s gift so the flowers would all be perky!! The family stayed an hour and a half and we were so hopeful we’d get an offer right away from them. We got good feedback but were also told they are still looking at other houses.
Our Saints play their first pre-sesason game this Friday night! I saw this picture/quote below today. It’s me all the way and I want you to share with ya’ll! Roy said many times he could hear me through our outside walls in our sticks and bricks house when he was outside during a game. Can you imagine what people must think when we’re in our RV. Roy’s right up there with me these days cheering and doing what he can to encourage and fuss at our boys too!
Last year we were in Minnesota for preseason games with very little coverage of Saints games that far north. We even watched one of the games last year over Skype watching the game on my son’s TV in Louisiana. We’re quite pleased to have such good TV coverage here and be in Black and Gold land right now, if just for three hours this Friday night and weekly until the house sells!!!
Ya’ll have a wonderful week – REMEMBER – God loves you!
BECAUSE HE LIVES 