If you’ve been following this blog for longer than a year then you know that waaaaaaay back when I started in the fall of 2016 I was working at my part-time Secret Work-From-Home Day Job, which served as my main source of income while I edited the second and third drafts of my novel.
At the time I didn’t talk much about my Secret Work-From-Home Day Job on the grounds that revealing too much about my job or my employer could cause some confidentiality issues, or that I’d be found by company Google searches and they’d discover my decidedly noncomformist workplace philosophies. In retrospect, though, the secrecy was probably unnecessary since not actually naming my employer or discussing actual work stuff kept me safe from possible confidentiality breaches.
I also haven’t worked for my old employer in nearly a year, and I don’t see myself working for them in the future, which is also why I feel safe revealing here, for the very first time, that my Secret Work-From-Home Day Job was in fact….
An online essay test grader.
(that buildup would have been a lot more intense if I hadn’t already revealed it in the title….)
What Do Online Test Graders Do?
The company I worked for employed hundreds if not thousands of people on a part-time basis to read the essay portions of its standardized tests and give them numeric scores. We worked during set shifts, at our home computers, entirely online. For the regular multiple-choice questions (Mouse is to Small as Ambidextrous is to _________, etc.) machines could scan the circles and assign the scores, but for the essays, the company needed actual, human readers to read each one. Said human raters used an Unbelievably Specific set of criteria to give each essay a set numeric score.
At first the scoring system felt ridiculously draconian (“How in God’s name can you reduce human complexity of thought to a 1–4 scale???”) but after a few months I got it down to a science and learned to skim each essay for the criteria points so I could give it a score and move on. You didn’t have to read each essay per se, mostly just scour it for the tipping points that would determine its score (a 2 instead of a 3, etc.).
I won’t tell you which standardized test I did most of my reading for, but let’s just say it was a certain aptitude test that a lot of high-school juniors and seniors take to get into college ;-)
The initial worst part about the job was that aside from a few variations in topic every. Fucking. Essay. Was. The. Same. and reading dozens of them every day caused your brain to shut down, with the monotony only broken up by the occasional student who drew a picture or wrote about the pointlessness of the essay-writing exercise itself. I also found one essay written by a 26-year-old who was taking the test after losing in his fantasy football league and who wrote a compelling essay comparing the prompt to fantasy football in deliciously tangential ways.
After several hundred hours of doing this unbelievably monotonous job I got promoted to a supervisor of all the new essay-raters who were doing this unbelievably monotonous job. The promotion came with a $2.25 per hour raise and meant that instead of reading essays all shift I got to make phone calls and send chat messages helping other raters use the Unbelievably Specific Scoring Criteria, which most raters understandably found Unbelievably Confusing.
I worked this job for just over a year and found it to have some definite good and bad points….
The Pros
Flexible Hours
Each month I scheduled work for the days I was available and it was easy to cancel my shifts if something came up, even on short notice. Choosing when to start work also meant that I could sleep in on weekends or schedule my shifts around my creative work, which helped me get a lot done when I was at my most energetic.
Little to No Supervision
I’ve always worked best when I can work independently without being micromanaged or subject to constant criticism. I also don’t like working where other people can see my embarrassingly exaggerated work habits (constant pacing, suddenly shouting “I nailed it!” etc.), so working alone in my room with only the occasional call from a supervisor made me a happy guy.
I Could Do Other Work During My Shifts
This was a big one. My company expected raters to grade one essay every 5 minutes, which was then marked with a timestamp….but once I learned the ropes, I could finish an essay in 2-3 minutes (or even quicker for shorter essays!), thus leaving me a few minutes before I was expected to mark the next time stamp. These stolen bits of paid time were perfect for relatively uninvolved tasks like writing emails, researching places to pitch my novel, and paying bills—anything that didn’t require a lot of thought. Sometimes I even ate breakfast, cooked, or washed dishes between essays, which also kept me moving physically.
This meant that my Day Job worktime usually doubled as creative Worktime, which made me more efficient and led to my getting even more done (Score!).
No Commute
This one needs no explanation—the time and gas money I saved by not driving to a workplace added up fast.
These things all made a BIG difference, but the Cons were pretty significant too…
The Cons
Not Enough Hours
I wrote about this as my biggest reason for leaving the job and I’ll put it front and center here: most months I just couldn’t get enough hours. When I first started the job the company was short on raters and encouraging people to work mad overtime (which I took advantage of because I wanted to save some mad money), but in later months they hired too many people who were all scrambling for hours, which meant I had to open my availability up like crazy just to work a few days per month.
Though my hours eventually balanced out to around 20-30 per week, barely working at all for those middle few months left me in precarious financial straits, a fear that drove me to scoop up extra hours on a lower-paying elementary-school testing program and schedule too many hours during the busy periods, which led to my working 65 hours the same week I went to see a New Pornographers’ concert and my roommate blew a flat tire on my car.
After a while, the juggling act just got to be too much and I realized I needed out.
The Work Was Turning My Brain to Mush
This was the other really big one—eight straight hours of grading the same essays with the SAME stock-response sentences the students had learned in their test-prep classes really started wearing on me, to the point where I had trouble focusing on even the basics of any one essay. This led to my doing sloppy work or just taking a really long time—and this lack of productivity led to a lot of clock-watching and frustration that in turn left me feeling even more drained at the end of every shift.
To make matters worse, the side work (writing emails, paying bills, etc.) that I was squeezing in between essays was instilling me with a MASSIVE attention span problem as my brain shifted focus to a vastly different activity 20-24 times per hour (away from essay-grading, then back again) and left me feeling scatterbrained most of the time.
Not only did the constant attention-shifting affect my ability to do my other work (here’s a good article explaining why), but it meant that at the end of every shift I felt a desperate need to lay down with my eyes closed and zone out just to get away from those constant shifts in focus. I also started getting more headaches that only made things worse, and some evenings after a shift I wouldn’t feel like diving into my creative work at all—which was a HUGE deterrent.
The Company Started Dangling Shifts to Suit Its Own Schedule, Not Mine
Once their initial backlog of tests was cleared away the company got really good at timing the exact number of worktime hours needed to finish a batch of tests—and any test volume on top of that was scheduled on a first-come, first-served basis. During these cleanup periods the company started sending out emails on random mornings asking if anyone could work that day (which directly contributed to my unhealthy email-checking impulses last year), thus forcing the difficult decision of whether to abandon my original day’s work plan so I could pick up extra money.
I hated feeling jerked around like this—I didn’t have to sign up for those extra shifts, but I felt afraid not to because I wasn’t sure when the work would dry up again. Prioritizing money over my writing felt like a daily betrayal of my principles as I kept snatching up those carrots the company was throwing.
Some of the Other Raters Were Downright Mean
This shouldn’t have bothered me as much as it did, but every once and a while I’d meet someone who would snap at me on the phone, insult my intelligence, or assume that I was somehow responsible for the Unbelievably Confusing Guidelines that all test raters had to follow, which led to some nasty confrontations. These days often left me feeling frustrated and angry, and made me think more about how I never wanted to deal with these kinds of people at work ever again.
It Was Good For A While, But the Cons Outweighed the Pros
I don’t regret working that job for as long as I did, since it helped me save a lot of money during those first few months and gave me the perfect part-time break-even cushion while I focused on my novel. I do regret, though, working as many hours I did in the final months before starting my Secret Office Day Job, since I felt driven by fears about my financial future to work more than I wanted to.
If I ever decided to grade tests again it would DEFINITELY be on an occasional basis only, for no more than 10-15 hours a week, and preferably less. I never felt burned-out after only working one or two shifts per week, and if I could somehow supplement that with enough other income to keep the bills paid, I wouldn’t feel like my Day Job was controlling me anymore.
But for now, though, I’ve got to consider other options.
I write about my Day Job experiences because I know you’ve been there too—and probably think about a lot of the same things I do. Like But I Also Have a Day Job on Facebook or follow my occasional email list for more insights into the stuff you think about but never quite put into words.