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Author Micah Cambre

elance is as bad as aol

I cannot delete my account off of elance.

In order to get to their customer service, I have to go to their About page and THEN I find a Contact page. If you see the link on the bottom right that say “Send us your feedback”, it goes to a forum. I didn’t want a forum, I wanted an email address, contact us form, or at the very least a phone number. I just want to delete my account.

Elance has been of no use to me. I won’t sit here and say it doesn’t work at all because, of course, many people make a living from the site. But I find Elance’s methods and system far too complicated, convoluted and just plain annoying.

One of my biggest beefs? The test to show your proficiency in WordPress refers you to either version 2.5 or 2.3. That was about 2 years ago, Elance! Do you think I remember WordPress from 2 years ago? Half of those questions are outdated or inconsistent with the most recent versions. Why can’t they keep their survey question and content up to date?

I didn’t even bother trying to get freelance jobs because I’m bidding against other crappy designers who are willing to work for next to nothing. I can’t compete with their prices if I want to make a living.

All I want to do is get rid of my account. Why don’t you offer an easy, non-aol like experience to delete your account online? I don’t wanna make a phone call, either. Besides, it’s after 5pm on a weekend night and your customer support center is closed.

I’m disappointed in Elance and want my search results and history completely deleted. I’m sure other people have similar experiences and I feel sorry for others like me who found this site to be of no service and much more of a nuisance.

less work please

No more web design projects.

I can’t handle anymore at the moment. I am inundated with so much to do right now and I want a break. I’ve had to purposely neglect my own website while I finish these other projects. It sucks too because I can always use the extra money and pages to put into my portfolio. But, I realize I’m in over my head and I’m a little burnt out. Maybe this’ll change sometime next year but this is it for me for now. I have a feeling that this current round of sites will probably take another couple of months to completely finish but the workload right now is huge. And it’s almost Christmas. Blah.

Besides my freelance projects, I have my full-time and part-time design jobs that also keep me extremely busy. And I’ve had to neglect the part-time a lot because of the freelance. And there’s so much I could do on a weekly basis to help them out. Soon.

I think the foremost reason I’m ready to stop is because I’m not allowing myself any time to pursue other things. I want to do so much else while I live here in LA and now that I’m funding myself and paying off my debt, I need to spend my freetime pursuing those other passions. I do not want to be a one career guy but I am content doing the things I’m doing now. Maybe a little too content as I’ve overloaded myself, but life is good. I just know that if I don’t sacrifice some of this for other stuff, I’ll regret it. And I hate regrets.

The critical part of me continues to tell myself that I need to take some courses to learn programming languages (PHP, Javascript) or software (Flash) that I don’t know. It’s not that I am not able to learn this on my freetime, it’s just I don’t have enough freetime to even begin to sit down and hash it out. Not only that but the structure of a classroom where I can learn bits sequentially would highly benefit me. There are many applications of the classroom setting that I cannot stand, where it makes the material boring and mundane. But I think that learning moderately hard computing languages will take more effort and time that I can’t just sit down and dedicate (I guess the level of difficulty can be debated). Anyway, I’m not sure if this is going to be an option either.

Changes shall be made. I need them. Bad.