I talked about quitting my job yesterday. Well I did it, I phoned my boss and he didn’t seem surprised. He agreed and said that I need to do what’s best for myself, etc, so I feel that things could have been worse. Unfortunately he asked that I work on Saturday although I don’t want to do it.
But the good news is that I could have gotten a pretty decent online job. I have a pretty highly tuned bullshit detector, but this seems like it’s for real. The job involves editing transcripts to ensure accuracy from an audio file. This sounds very boring, but the thing is that it seems to pay pretty well. Here’s a link to the job offer.
http://losangeles.craigslist.org/sfv/wri/292846066.html
I did a little research and the company does indeed sell transcripts of quarterly conference calls. They sell for 70 dollars apiece! Why does this seem sound? Well, from my experience working a bit in a few offices in finance in New York, the amount of money spent on information and research is huge. A Bloomberg terminal is a huge expense. And these quarterly conference calls are very numerous. It all seems to make some amount of sense. Also there is no kind of upfront fee (obvious scam) also all payments are done by check. So the only risk I run here, I suppose is doing work for free for a while, which I’m willing to take.
So, the speed at which this has happened has been crazy. I sent my resume last night, and got an invite to a conference call today. I participated, thinking that there would be some kind of interview, but it was basically an information session. That’s cool. Here’s the barrier to entry. I need to complete one sample transcript, in order to be approved. There is a detailed description teaching us how to do it. Once we are done with that we’ll have 5 more test transcripts. However, these 5 will be paid. The reason they are considered “test” transcripts, is because the quality of them will not be counted against us. After that I’d be a full member, with a normal workload of at least 10 hours a week and much higher in the coming months because there will be loads of new conference calls coming out due to the end of the quarter.
So I suppose I’m happy if I can manage to do this. We’ll have to see how it goes, but if I can manage to do a good job during the busy season, I’ll have enough cash to get by without a job. Although I won’t stop looking.
What do you guys think? The economics seem right. I’ve seen the prices of the products they are selling, and the compensation seems to be pretty reasonable. They pay me about three times the price of a product that they’ll sell numerous copies of at absolutely no overhead. This doesn’t seem pie-in-the-sky at all, and I can’t see how I would be screwed at this point. The company is openly visible on the internet, and seems to be reputable.
Any thoughts or advice?