Team Sports have never been my thing and I’ve never been able to understand American football in my life. It seemed to me that the rules of that game were always changing. But it felt particularly apt this week.TEC has taken the decision to do the sales themselves and not pay outside people to do it. I still have scheduling work that I do for them, but it was a significant portion of my income. I am cynical enough that while I think that they claim that it’s bad sales, I feel like they’re looking for an excuse to reduce their staff and their cost. But they have also rolled back their prices to the customer as well. The scheduling work this week however was quite plentiful with some intensives that needed to be scheduled as well as new students that also needed to be placed. But that could change next week. What’s been a challenge is trying to get rooms booked as one of the locations that we use is often not available when we need it. And I am finding that this is increasing across all of the locations that The English Center uses for their classes within Amsterdam. It’s become very difficult to book rooms on short notice. All of this does not make up for the fact that I will probably be working fewer hours for the English Center and I don’t have much to offset that in terms of clients both TEC and private.
I have two clients at TEC who are shortly going to finish up with me. I think one has five hours and the other has nine and a half. Flowently is my most consistent gig at the moment. The kicker is my private client world. A few weeks ago, I was approached by a client who wanted me to do lessons with a friend of hers at her office. I went on Thursday and had lessons with both of them. We had a wonderful lesson with my normal client. I met her friend and she also seemed to like the lesson. Over the weekend, I duly started prepping for everybody’s lessons so that I could be fully focused on prepping for the Imres lesson on Monday the 5th of June. On Sunday I got a text from the client with whom I had done two hours on Thursday and she said she was not going to be taking any more lessons. It was not a complete no as she said she wouldn’t have any lessons during the vacation time and would contact me after. But this leaves me with a time management dilemma. I do not want to travel out to the middle of nowhere just for three hours because it takes three hours to get there. I would have happily traveled there for five hours, however, and I accommodated these 5 hours by moving things off my schedule on Thursdays. Important things that I could have kept. One of which is a therapy session via Zoom in the States which is important to me. I was quite angry, but at least the other client is willing to go online. My Japanese client has about 14 hours left of her 68-hour package. Shinwei and I continue our lessons and I think we will continue for quite a while to come. So while it’s not all bad, my access to clients could certainly be better. And while I am making strides with that having written up a new text for my website as well as sending it to a translator, I have not yet started the campaigns for the website. But hopefully, I’ll be able to get some traction once the campaigns actually begin. Fingers crossed.
A bright spot for the week was being able to reconnect with my writing. While I wasn’t able to connect on Thursday, I was able to reconnect on Saturday and actually get some writing done during the day with some writer friends who meet sporadically on the weekends. It was just nice to sit in a place that had lovely views of the water and commune with people who are like-minded. I also was able to get a clearer picture of what I want to do with the novel and where I want to go with the next book because it looks like this is going to be a series. Nerys and her crew are by no means done.
That’s all she wrote for this Inkreadable installment. But stay tuned. As always, there is more to come.