Alright just let me rant.

Freelancing can be good extra money. I work my full-time job, and then I return home to work on my freelance work, and I can earn more than my full-time job's monthly income just from my freelancing job. It's good money, it is. But when you might be having your PMS and you become really easy to piss off, the zen and endless patience that you are known for just dissolves, rots and disappears like Logan Paul's popularity.

Here's shit that I want to complain about.

You will meet employers who pay you only after you bug them endlessly for days and lodge a report against them. "Don't worry, we will pay you today." You wait today, tomorrow, and the next entire week and there will be no progress. They will contact you when they need you to work, but when you send a message regarding payments, they will leave your messages unread.

You will meet employers who say, "Relax. I've been here a long while. Your pay won't go anywhere" and refuse to use the safe payment options which guarantees that you will get paid. "Please accept the pending milestone so that I can continue working," you might say. They will blast you with a series of "Don't worry" and "Don't worry" and did I mention more "Don't worry"?

You will meet employers who give you vague instructions and expect you to understand, refusing to elaborate more and then ask for endless revisions when you follow the vague instructions. "U dnt understn the work dear." Of course I don't. That's why I asked. Don't 'dear' me. It's disgusting and it makes me want to punch you in the face.

You will meet cheap-ass bastards who want to pay you $0.50 for a 300-word article or maybe pay you $3 for a 1000-word article. "This is going to be a long-term project so please bid accordingly."
Dear sirs and missuses, how about I employ you to do my job for me but I pay you like $2 each day. It's long-term afterall. You can do it until you retire. How does that sound?

You will meet bid wasters. A lot of freelancing job sites require you to use a bidding system. You want to get pure profit without purchasing extra bids? There's bid wasters for that. You have extra bids that you worked hard to pay for? There's bid wasters for that too. "Contact me on Skype for more information." How about no and fuck off?

You will meet creepers. "I'm looking for an open-minded virtual assistant to hold video calls and phone calls with me." Don't even bother with those. You see the word 'open-minded' and 'video calls' linked together, you run. That's what you do.

You will meet unreasonable buyers. You can tell them "I can only work on flexible hours since I have a full-time job. I should be able to write about 2 - 3K words daily at max." and they will still bug you non-stop as if they did not know about your full time job even if you remind them again and again.

You will meet assholes and asshats and asses in general. You will also meet cunts and dicks and twats and donkeys; whatever swear word that is trending where you come from.

You will meet all of these and still struggle to find the inner peace and patience in you that lets you reply or send a message to them nicely so that at least you are being a decent human being, all just so that your chat won't be reported and your account won't be closed. The easier solution?

"Hi *Name*, I don't think that I can work with you anymore. You are not very reasonable to work with and I prefer not to continue our collaboration. Please release any pending payments and we can discuss further after that if you have any other requests."

I have finally managed to get $300 in pending payment today after more than a week of trying to get a buyer to release the pending amount. Keep in mind that the works have been approved and revisions have been made. Keep in mind also, that it was agreed upon that the payments should be released within 48 hours after the work is approved.

I finally got my money, but I'm still pissed.

Maybe it's the birth control medication that I am trying.

And now, lunch time.

Also, I'm grateful for all the good buyers that I managed to work with. Thank you guys for being pleasant and releasing the funds on time and all your clear instructions, etc etc.

Bless.

Hey there guys,

I have been inactive for some time now, and that's because aside from my full-time job, I have some time afterwards to spend with my man (the best part of everyday. I love you darlin'), and when he leaves, I'll be working on my Freelance jobs.

That makes my daily life look something like this:

7.30a.m. - Reaches workplace and works on miscellaneous tasks & freelance jobs
8.30a.m. - Actual Full-Time Job
6.00p.m. - Quality time with my man
8.30p.m. - Freelance jobs
11.00p.m. - Getting some sleep

I have accounts on several freelancing platforms - Freelancer.com, People Per Hour, Guru.com & Fiverr. I joined UpWork a little too late and there is more than enough content writers there at the moment, so I could not get my account approved. Of the 4 platforms I have joined, I have earned through 3 of them - not Fiverr.

Guru.com and People Per Hour was quite decent with their free accounts, but Freelancer.com provided a one-month free trial as a premium member, which allowed me to have more than 309 bids to waste on scam assignments & cheap Indian prices (Not that I meant to be racist, but seriously, offering a non-negotiable rate of $2 for 1000 words with endless restrictions & conditions?)

I am still relatively new to the freelance jobs on Freelancer.com, and sad to say, I have been scammed for my work quite a little. Here's what I learnt from the scammers of Freelancer.com.

1) Check their profiles

Signs of a No-Go Buyer

Let's see. No verified e-mail, no verified phone number, account incomplete, no payment verification and has not made a deposit. 0 reviews. Fishy. Mouse over the star ratings, and you see this:

GO THE OTHER WAY. REPORT. ABORT MISSION.

2. The Price

Is the price too low?

3. Off-site Communication

Requests for off-site communication should be avoided wherever possible

I have some mixed feelings about this. Most of the scammers like to communicate on Skype and pay you through Paypal or some other external sources rather than work with you on the freelancing platform. If the user has no ratings and immediately asks you to start communicating with them on Skype, that's not a good sign. Based on my personal experience, these users are repeated offenders for scamming users and can be reported fairly quickly. Even if they have pending milestones (pending payments that supposedly have non way to be cancelled) there are cases where the accounts will be closed immediately on Freelancer.com before the money gets through. It's either that, or you end up writing 20 articles at a rate that is too good to be true, and later get ghosted when it's time to pay up. You can refer to my portfolio or recent scammed works here, published just so that the buyers of my articles can never use them since they will detect a 100% plagiarism based on my site - scammed-freelancers.blogspot.com.

On the bright side, you can customize the navigation buttons to reorder them, and can access them through the floating dock as well!

On the 12^th of November, just barely one week ago, I dropped my Lenovo P-70A which has been with me for over 2 years, down the kitchen counter when my hands slipped. It was a good phone. I bought it somewhen in July 2015 when my man was with me (although he wasn’t my man yet at that time) for around RM700.

Things I loved About This Phone Model

•  Battery capacity is relatively huge compared to other phone models
• That green security icon thing that gives you a very, very efficient clear-your-apps function that you can’t get from any other apps 
• Optional app clearing that lets you lock down some apps while clearing all the others
• Dual SIM cards & still a space for an external memory card although you don’t really need that with the 16 GB internal storage.

Things That Could Be Improved

• The brightness goes all the way to the highest settings when you enter the gallery, regardless of your settings. Imagine opening up your photo gallery at night and getting blinded. Mhmm.
• You can’t adjust the brightness settings in the notification bar area when you are using your phone in horizontal mode, so if you have entered a video full-screen mode and it’s too dark, you need to exit the full-screen mode, adjust the brightness, then go back to full-screen again.
• No matter how high-resolution your photos are, the moment you set it to your desktop/lockscreen wallpaper, it will get blurry in a pixel-ish way.
• It can overheat quite a bit sometimes.
• The camera is just okay-ish.

Why I'm So Against The Phone OS Upgrade

• The battery consumption rate was so high even at low usage that I needed to charge it up to 3 times a day.
• The app-clearing function was pretty much gone, replaced by an incompetent piece-of-shit button.
• I can have only Messenger, Facebook & WhatsApp running (with background apps cleared up to 5 times just in case), and the phone would still lag so hard that if a call comes in, I can’t press anything on the screen. The incoming-calls screen wouldn’t even show up.
• I can’t stress enough about the lag. If there were incoming video calls, I need to wait for up to 5 seconds after tapping the ‘answer’ button before that click actually registers.
• The photo quality became a pile of shit too. Good luck taking photos with actual faces that aren’t smoothened out & blurred so much that you might as well pretend you actually did a bad Photoshop job with a good photo.
• The screen gestures option was no longer available. My phone’s power button has become a bit hard to press after some time using it, so it can be slightly difficult to unlock it at times. Screen gestures enabled me to just tap the screen a few times to activate it, but this feature was gone too.
• If there was overheat at the previous OS, this version made it worse and more often.

• Well, barely a week later this phone still fell face-first onto the floor and the screen cracked anyways. I took off the tempered glass screen protector a while back since that too was already full of cracks and never got a replacement. After many lucky falls, this one did the job.
• The bottom half of the screen was not responsive at all, which means that I could turn on the phone screen but not enter my passcode.
• I could long-press the power button to attempt to switch it off since I can no longer turn off the morning alarms, but I can’t press the ‘confirm’ button when the phone asks me, “Confirm switch off?”