Browsing through the job postings in the past few weeks, in an attempt to gauge how bad things really are, I’ve noticed an interesting trend. I’ve seen a number of job postings, both for freelance and full-time positions, that specifically indicate that the company would like to pay a decent wage but “due to the economy” are unable to pay as much as they might normally.

While I’m all for transparency when it comes to job postings, especially with regard to compensation, the whole idea of suggesting that one can’t pay a decent wage due to the overall economic situation seems a little absurd and dishonest to me. It’s my opinion that by using the economy as an excuse, some businesses hope to get professional services at a fraction of their cost. Those companies can’t be blamed, because they’re probably right. The freelancers and contractors out there are the ones that tend to hurt the most when economic hard times abound. Said freelancers are more likely to take a lower hourly wage in order to compensate for the lack of work that’s available.

Hopefully the concept of “you get what you pay for” comes back to haunt a lot of these not-overly-honest businesses and, in turn, will causes a nice boom in pay and opportunities for creative types in the near future.

I got a short, 2 to 3 week, contract job at Studio3 doing digital retouch on product shots for a consumer item that’s launching soon. Although I can’t really talk about the specifics, the one item I’ve seen looks like it might be pretty successful. I’m doing clipping paths, dust/cleanup, and color correction for proofs. I guess in the last round of proofs there will be some critical color work done, but I’m not sure how involved in that I’ll be.

It’s funny, I interviewed and did a Photoshop test at Studio3 on Thursday of last week and then one of the owners called me on Friday night, leaving a message about needing someone unexpectedly for the coming week through the end of May. He called me again Saturday at 9:30 in the morning. He said that they had been interviewing and testing people for future projects that would require help and that it just happened that this project came up. He was very kind and said that he felt I was a good candidate and he even said I was over qualified and that he’d understand if I turned it down, but it worked out: I needed some freelance work to pad my portfolio (plus I love retouching) and Gwynn and I needed a legitimate excuse to motivate us to get our own baby sitter, finally.

In other news, Gela broke the world record in the “Hanging onto the Shower Curtain Rod, After a Bath” event, this evening. The standing record was 4.5 seconds and tonight she held on for 7.47 seconds, thus beating the previous record by over 1.4 seconds. That record was set back in 1987 by one Daniel M. Jabowski, from Ellington, CT. Danny was 1 year and 5 months at the time.

Good night.

Freelance has been good to me and I enjoy it, but things have slowed down to the point that new dust is settling on the old dust. On Friday I had one in person interview and two phone interviews all for full time employment. One of the phone interviews and the face to face were for graphic design positions and the other phone conversation was for a production job. We’ll see how things go. I’m still keeping my eye out for any solid and serious image retouching positions.