A few years ago I decided I was sick and tired of working shit jobs for shit pay.  even the cool local anarcho-friendly worker-owned cooperative wanted to pay me $16/hour to do graphic design with them and billed their clients at $72 / hour.  There was no boss to skim off the top, but rent in the bay area is insane and their office building and state of the art computers cost a lot of money, money that had to come out of the proceeds of their labor before they could afford to pay themselves.  And that’s just no fun.  So I started advertizing on craigslsit and set myself up as a graphic designer working from home.  The job is still kinda boring and I’m not thrilled about all my clients, but I get to set my own hours, work as little or as much as I feel like, and I don’t have to pay a boss to tell me what to do.    (Incidentally, it may suprise some of you that I have a job at all, but the thing about giving my music away for free / donation is that I don’t get paid for it…)

I’ve been self-employed for a bit over 2 years now and it’s good times, for the most part.  The hardest thing about making the switch - aside from taking that first leap into the unknown - has been learning to motivate myself to work and manage my own time in a way that lets me do everything I need to get done efficiently, keep my clients happy, and still leave me plenty of time for music, activism, and just plain being a human.  It’s was one thing to free myself from wage slavery (though, come to think of it, I still get paid an hourly wage.  but at least I set it myself and don’t have to give a portion of it to my boss…) and it was another thing entirely to figure out how to keep from going totally broke.  Learning to self-manage has been a long tough proccess, but is a critical one for anyone interested in smashing the tyranny of bosses and creating a self-managed society.

In that spirit I present to you the following flash movie, courtesy of No Media Kings.

They also have a text version (here) and a comic version, also available from their website.  Check ‘em out!