On Tue, 11 Nov 2003 00:55:02 GMT, "Mark Jerde"
wrote:

Much of the .com boom was the incompetent doing the unnecessary for the
unrealistic, with the net result of inconsequentiallty.

8-)

I did fairly well on the dot.com boom (but nothing like as well as
some). Now I'm chasing work that isn't there, for rates that are
somewhere near they were 15 years ago, and less than half I was
getting two years ago.

I'm old. I was doing this stuff _long_ before the dot.com thing, and
I'm good at it (if I go to an overseas conference, it's because I'm an
invited speaker). But there's a horde of mid-20s dot-com idiot Nathans
out there who think they know it all, yet will now work for peanuts.
It's very hard to find work in this climate.

Even woodworking isn't paying. All I can get is minimum-wage labouring
work. I can't even get a decent joinery job, because I'm not
officially trained as a toobefour chopsaw merchant. Then I come home
to my own workshop and agonise over the accuracy of my 17th century
sandarac varnish formulation, or the exact proportions of a Greene &
Greene bridle joint. The only option seems to be selling my own work,
but that's fighting against Ikea's pricing and I really _don't_ want
to run a business (BTDT, hated it).

--
Die Gotterspammerung - Junkmail of the Gods