Writing quizzes Part 5

In addition to seeing the quiz takers as money, they saw the freelancers as content producers. Well some freelancers went months with topics on their plate, we all were told we needed to hurry and finish quizzes. The deadlines became shorter. Then they hired a slew of freelancers to "get through the list" One month later, the new freelancers were gone and so were most of the easy to do movie quizzes. What was left was mainly knowledge quizzes.

Those of us who were still writing (and I will never know if those temporary freelancers just left themselves or got up one day, tried to log on and found they couldn't) were told that we could come up with our own ideas. We were given a set of criteria and then once we found an idea that met this criteria we could post it for "approval."

After a few months of this, I happened to notice that some of the "unapproved" ideas I had presented were being given to other freelancers.

Now, at this point, I almost left. I SHOULD have left. I demanded payment for my ideas (since it did take a lot of time to do the research). I was refused. I was told I could leave if I wanted and they would understand (of course they would- why would they want me around once I figured it out). But I needed the money. And getting new jobs is a bigger pain than keeping old ones. I had grown lazy in my freelancing. With warning bells going off (that had actually been going off since the start), I kept pushing forward.

A new moderator was hired, (the old one moved up), jobs that were posted irregularly were posted on Fridays between 3 and 8 pm. Freelancers would hover like vultures on the spreadsheet for sometimes five hours waiting for the release.

And this is where the system became inhumane. Again, warning bells. Sometimes they would only post a few quizzes. Maybe ten for twenty freelancers, but those who could were still allowed to get four at a time. People went weeks without one quiz. At that point, they should have looked at different variables: who has produced the most in the past year, who gets the most positive quiz reviews, who has been working for us the longest, etc. They should have explained they no longer had the volume and needed to let freelancers go. Instead, they kept promising more work. They asked who wanted to write articles (but never transitioned many to that task.) And then there would be another disappointing week with not enough quizzes to go around.

Finally, last week, they stopped responding to my questions. I had begun to upload two of my quizzes and ran into a problem with one. Someone dropped a long overdue quiz and I jumped to take it, but that guy told me I could not (and he was just another freelancer). I figured out later that he had been told to give it to someone else. Anyway, I asked if I was uploading the quiz correctly and asked them to check one of the problems to see if I needed to include more information. They didn't reply. Not for a day, but for three days. In fact, I realized I hadn't been getting responses for several weeks with some of the other questions I had asked and some of my past conversations were archived and no longer accessible (including the one where I had called them out on using my ideas without permission). Hmmm....

When I got on Friday to try to grab some quizzes and everyone was told there was a technical difficulty. We had to wait until Monday.

I got on Monday with no problem initially. Suddenly, I lost access to the chat server we use. Then the spreadsheet. Then the quiz loading site. Nothing was said to me, it just all went down before my eyes. Keep in mind, I had completed quizzes that just needed to be uploaded and I had bills to pay with those completed quizzes.  I also had more than ten ideas for new quizzes posted on the spreadsheet that I had been waiting 8 weeks to hear a decision on.

I heard no word, until thankfully I was able to make an announcement about my predicament to all the group on Guru. (Guru doesn't allow conversations to be deleted. That is probably why they made all the freelancers switch to Slack about a year ago.) That got a response- "Sorry, we don't need you anymore." Uh, what about the quizzes, especially the ones I had partially uploaded? Sadly, I didn't use SafePay at this point. I wonder if the freelancers still using SafePay are the ones still employed. I did submit a bill (with the complete quizzes in Word format) for the two partially uploaded quizzes that I did not think would be paid (it was), but I am out the other two. I spent the rest of the day looking for a new job, but in the world of freelance the chance of getting something that I can turn into income by the end of the week (on such short notice) is rare.

Did they have too many freelancers? Yes. Did they need to weed some out? Yes, but long before this point. The way I was "let go" was very unprofessional. I should have had my questions answered last week so I could have at least finished uploading all the quizzes. I should have been told (preferably a week in advance) that I was being let go and not to take any more quizzes, but to finish the ones I had started. It is never acceptable to "let someone go" without first letting them know the reason. This applies to the freelance world as well as the traditional workplace. Unfortunately, in a society with dying social skills (due to the online fake social world we have created), professionalism is suffering.

As a freelancer, I had warning signs this was happening, but it is tough to let go of regular work. Finding new regular projects is much more difficult than finding temporary ones. Getting new employers to pay what writers are worth ($0.05-$0.10 per word for good writers up to $0.50 per word) is also hard. But, it was definitely time to move on. The final message to me said something along the lines of we will contact you in the future if things change, but do they really think I would want to work with them again? Steady work is wonderful, but the chance that you might not get paid for it is not. Also, not giving someone a couple weeks to find a new job in the world of freelance can be financially devastating.