Workweek

For those of you not in the know, I've been semi-actively looking for a job the past several months. However, due to the current state of the economy (and my own stupidity), I haven't been able to get one.

Fortunately, that changed this week. Brother Vaughan, an entrepreneur in our ward, needed some cheap help (I suspect there was some pity involved too) and unofficially hired me for the week. Basically, he runs a small e-commerce business that originally sold safety-related products but has branched out a bit.

Most of the work I did for him was data-entry related. For instance, he was transferring one of his sites, Lights for all Occasions, to a new platform. One thing this meant that all the URLs would end up changing, which would break any links that pointing to the site, which would be a Bad Thing. To prevent this from happening, he compiled a list of all of the old site's URLs, and had me use the product numbers and such to find the corresponding URLs on the new site (hosted on a staging server). And I had to do this before the new site when up.

Basically this amounted to two hours of pressing Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V (copy & paste). My left hand hurt afterwards.

Other things I did:

• Added headings and descriptions to all the product category pages for three of his sites.
• Filled the empty "Department" and category pages with products (or removed them entirely).
  
• Applied quantity discounts to products.
• Laminated 300 safety cards.
• Put lots of AA batteries into little ziplock bags.

This amounted to about 23 hours of work ($10/hr, you do the math) between Monday and Thursday, after which he determined that he was all caught up and didn't need my help anymore. He later said that without my extra help it would have taken him and his already busy staff three weeks to do the stuff I did. Needless to say, I'll be putting this on my resume.

Maybe it's the money, or the free lunch Bro Vaughan was kind enough to provide me, but, all in all, I think I like this "work" thing. It feels rather fulfilling.

(Granted, I can see the commute getting on my nerves.)