My Story

So here’s my story, the story of how I got to be “so lucky” as to land a telecommuting job.

I began searching the Internet for traditional-work alternatives in 1997 when I was expecting my first child. My husband and I had difficult and demanding work schedules and day care was neither a viable nor a desirable child care option for us. And I didn’t like the idea of someone else raising my children for the better part of many days.

I spent all my free time online looking at any options for resolving my desire to be a financially contributing member of my household, a productive member of society and a flexible mom. We’d just gotten a desktop computer and signed up with AOL (who didn’t back then) and in my mind, the Internet offered a potential solution for meâ€”a way to be here at home and still contribute to the world at large.

In the beginning, I found more scams and sales representative recruiters than actual opportunities or helpful ideas. It seemed as though stuffing envelopes or selling some product at home parties to family and friends might be the only methods of making money from home out there (neither of which was appealing to me). But I kept looking and evolving through several stages of ideas in my quest to find a job that I could successfully do from home.

Then I had my daughter and I took maternity leave. It took some threatening at work, but I took the entire twelve weeks to bond with my new baby and to continue my quest during nap times and at night. I was up around the clock anyway, right! Still, nothing came up and the time came when I had to go back to work or lose my job. My mother-in-law would come to take care of my daughter and every day I would leave, fighting tears on my 30+ mile commute to work.

But I kept looking and hoping that I’d find “the answer.” I came close to putting my typing skills to work as a medical transcriptionist, but I didnâ€™t like the thought of having to go out and talk doctorsâ€™ offices into letting me transcribe those little tapes of theirs into proper documentation. Plus, there’s all those complicated medical terms to learn and spelling isn’t one of my strong suits. I’d end up having to add all those medical terms to my spell check dictionary or worse yet, have to actually learn how to spell them all if I were forced to use some program that didn’t have a spell check feature.

I got discouraged along the way. It seemed as if I were trying to find the impossible, an employer who would hire me and allow me to perform the work at home. But I kept surfing the Internet, finding and lurking in forums and message boards (that’s all there really were back then). I read everything I could find about occupations I thought might boom with the Internet like graphics, desktop publishing and website design. I learned basic html coding. I’d print out newsletters and website pages that I didn’t have time to read online, stick them in a big black notebook and then read them during breaks at work and while I ate lunch.

I began sending out emails and letters to any work-at-home-able job vacancies I ran across online or in the local papers. I would list my skills, offer to work remotely and point out the benefits of contracting a remote employee. Then one day in 1998, one of the hundreds of contacts Iâ€™d made answered back.

She had recently opened her own business and was interested in finding new moms who had left the traditional work place but who were still interested in contributing in the working world. She realized that searching for moms who needed flexibility would dip into a virtually untapped resource in the workforce at large and keep her overhead low while she built her business.

After a few discussions back and forth, we agreed that she’d teach me what I needed to know but she wouldn’t pay me while doing so. I was thrilled. We signed a contract and I eventually began making an hourly salary but I didn’t quit my day job. I did both and I kept looking and learning online for other opportunities in case this one didn’t work out. I continued to learn html coding and basic website design, WYSIWYG programs, graphics programs and anything else I could think of.

I didn’t leave the safety of my day job until 1999, pregnant with my second child and convinced now that one way or another, I’d be fine working from home. It took a lot of arguing to convince my husband that it was the right thing to do. In the beginning he wasn’t very keen on me giving up my annual salary to “play” online.

Both of my children are in school now and Iâ€™m still working at home. I enjoy taking them to school and picking them up every day. I don’t regret the choices I’ve made and while I realize it’s not the “answer” to finding balance for everyone, it sure works for me.

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My Story

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