Archive for January, 2012

Best Piece of Equipment I Own

Thursday, January 26th, 2012

As I hung up the phone from a marathon conference call today, the only problem I had was a slightly warm ear.  No neckache, no headache, no sore shoulders.

That’s because I own a telephone with a headset.

The one I have is a Plantronics. It has a teeny, lightweight headset with a mic that’s really easy to position, and the sensitivity is just right–people can hear you clearly without picking up a ton of background noise.

The body of the phone is so small that rather than bother with the clip, I just put the phone in my pocket.

Every time I get stuck on the phone for more than 30 minutes, I am reminded anew how handy this phone is.  The only issue I have (and it may be unique to my setup) is that sometimes when I use it, I get kicked offline.

It’s just a channel conflict. Some phones, as an additional security measure, randomly choose a channel whenever you pick it up.  Since I can’t assign a channel to the phone, thus eliminating the conflict, I run the risk of losing the net every time I use it.

When I’m ready to get a new phone, I’m going to see if I can get a model that perhaps will allow me to exclude one or two channels (and I’ll put my router on those), but given how uncomfortable marathon phone sessions used to be, this is a small inconvenience.

If you think you may have to spend any amount of time on the phone for your work at home job or business,  this is a must-have-item!

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Well, it seems the spammers have found us

Wednesday, January 25th, 2012

I obviously don’t expect a great deal of traffic yet, this blog is just getting started. It’s amazing how many spammers have found it already. I get all excited because I think I have a comment, only to discover it’s yet more comment spam.

It’s amazing how much time it takes to deal with spam. I finally ended up organizing my email differently just because I was losing emails in the general background noise.

I use Eudora for my emails, since I’m used to it, but I know Outlook works in a similar way:

I set myself up a mailbox for each person I do work for called “Work–Name” and then set up the filters so that mail from each person goes into the designated box.

Sometimes I have to watch my inbox carefully for a while because the person may have multiple emails, but this has helped a lot–when there’s something new in the box, the box name is in bold, so I know to check it.

Speaking of checking email, how often do you check your email each day?

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Arise: Scam or Opportunity?

Tuesday, January 24th, 2012

I happened to run across an offer the other day that appeared to be from a local hotel, looking for desk workers.

I  applied immediately. My web development business is doing fairly well, but as anyone with a fairly new business knows, it can be up and down. The idea of having something part-time sounded good.

It turned out to be an offer to work for a company who works with Arise. Arise bills itself as a Virtual Call Center.

I was suspicious right away. While everyone’s BS threshold is a little different, if the opportunity was legit, then why was it being presented as a local job?

This is how it seemed to work. Arise has a bunch of contracts with varying companies for call center services. If you want to do these jobs, you have to first incorporate yourself/join an existing corporation.

I am no lawyer, but it seems to me that this is simply to make it absolutely clear in a legal sense that you are a company providing services to Arise, not an employee of Arise.  This allows Arise to offer a call center service without having to deal with inconveniences such as minimum wage laws.

The ad I saw was someone who had already incorporated looking for people to join their company, so the advertising of local jobs can’t be laid at Arise’s door but rather to that particular company.

I already mentioned that I felt suspicious, so I did some digging, and the first thing that caught my eye was that there was a class-action lawsuit against Arise in the state of California for… not paying minimum wage.

Here’s the thing. A lot of times, no matter if a company says that you are an independent contractor, whether you are or not has to meet certain tests by the IRS.  This is something I will talk about more in another post, but California appears to believe that fundamentally, all these people in sub-corporations contracted by Arise are really employees, and thus Arise owes taxes and compensation.

In further research, I discovered that Arise-connected people seemed to come in two flavors–really enthusiastic and really negative. You can check out some of the reviews here.

There were enough issues that I decided to give this one the go-by. It may be that with Arise, your success depends on the corporation you join, but I’d hate to have to pay all those training fees hoping to get work only to get ripped off.

Scam-o-meter: Proceed with extreme caution

 

 

 

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