“My 3rd job.... I want a loft...”
That was the entire explanation attached to a photo I sent from my phone.
Beatport was the real job. The infrastructure had grown into hundreds of systems, global traffic, storage, networks, releases, and plenty of late nights. I was the director of IT, but I was still close to the machines and the incidents.
The second job is consulting for a small group with servers, firewalls, virtual machines, mail, and a colocation setup. It started with an NDA and a limited block of hours.
The third came from a Craigslist reply in January. They wanted somebody to maintain Linux and cPanel servers for five to ten hours a week. I wrote in the afternoon, had a conversation the next day, and got the work.
The schedules stack on top of each other. A Beatport deployment can run twenty hours. The consulting firewall work happens after that. A monitoring process still sends errors when I am on an airplane.
I did not explain what was in the picture. I only connected the third job to the thing I wanted.
Three jobs mean more money. The message reduced that plan to a photo and one sentence.
I did not send a listing, price, address, budget, or schedule. The note did not turn the picture into a specific property plan. It only said what the extra work was attached to in my head.
“Some day we can have one yes?”
That was the second and final line.