Working a bunch of part-time jobs is better than a full-time job could ever be

Cash rules everything around me


I have a dream. A dream that consists of reaching the £10,600 yearly income tax barrier solely through part-time wonga. In doing so, I’ve learnt something important – what are usually viewed as employment stopgaps that do little more than occupy your time and fund your drinks at uni as you work towards securing a full-time career are secretly the very pinnacle of employment.

Even post-graduation, I’d rather have a bunch of side gigs than a single, monolithic main gig. Lend me an ear and I’ll even tell you why (I’m nice like that).

This was part of my commute at one point (RIP)

Variety’s the spice of life

I know people who do office work day-in, day-out. They don’t seem like they’re having a great time – they make it sound all very Office Space. Meanwhile, I work in an office irregularly enough that it’s still a novelty to me, rather than a soul-crushing reality (also, to be fair, the office is quite fun). Other gigs take me everywhere from Army barracks, to my room, to the great outdoors.

When people say that you don’t make as much money…

The usual criticism levied at part-time jobs is that they won’t earn you as much dollar as a real job. Whoop-de-doo, I say to that, money’s not the be all and end all that people seem to think it is. Really, you can have a lot more fun with a lot less cheddar if you use your head just a little bit.

…but that’s not even the case because you can still make dollar

The other big issue with the ‘you won’t make money’ argument is that it’s bollocks. What your income IS is irregular – you might work once a week one month and take home a couple hundred at the end, but the next one you could have the time to work four days a week and end up with just shy of a grand. Either way, you’ve netted a nice little sum over the two months, and when you apply that to a whole year – you could easily be raking it in with just a few jobs and the time to work them.

This cheeky chappie, coming soon to a workplace wall near you

Hell is other people

Nobody wants to be ‘That Guy‘ and maybe you know several (protip: if you don’t know any it may mean you are one). S/he might not even be that reprehensible of a human being, but for whatever reason the two of you were just never going to be pals. If you work with this person 9-5, five days a week, you will doubtless soon have to choose between quitting, trying to get them fired or going full Patrick Bateman. However, if you’re working with them once a week, the 10 per cent of your day they spend getting on your tits will barely register in the grand scheme things. Better yet, thanks to the next point you can even learn their schedule and make sure you never have to work with them.

You get incredibly flexible hours

Part-time work is great for its flexibility. You are expected to work x hours per week and can allocate them in a way that suits both you and your employer. Say there’s a talk or event you want to visit that’s an hour long just after lunch. Rather than having to work 9-5 and miss it, you just take that hour out. Say you’re bored one day and fancy making a bit of dollar, you just pop into the office and bash out an hour’s work.

Pay-by-hour rather than pay-by-month helps you visualise your time more

If I’m on £10.50/hr, that means I ought to be doing £10.50 worth of shit (or tea-making) each hour. If I take a five minute poo, that poo has just earned me 88p. It is important for me that I know this.

You’d be surprised how much you can learn working on a bar

You can become a jack of all trades, master of a bunch of them

People always tell you a diverse skillset is what gets you hired. At the traditional one-job-at-a-time pace of employment, that will take bloody ages. By working, say, five jobs—one for each day of the week—you can learn a whole load of diverse shit at the same time, from bar work to programming to teaching.

People will assume you’re joking when you tell them

You try telling someone you work five jobs and see how they react.

When they realise you’re not, they assume you’re some kind of demigod

I mean it’s not 100 miles off, but still. My time management game is just on point af.

Plus, just think of all the Christmas dos!

It may make you immortal

H. Jackson Brown Jr. has a quote: “Find a job you like and you add five days to every week”. With those five jobs though (right now at least – I’m waiting to hear back about a few more), you merely have to apply some simple math to see I’m adding 25 days to every week – that’s a 357.1 per cent increase in life per week. At this rate I’m well on course for immortality, and to be honest nobody deserves it more than me.

It helps you deal with rejection

Losing a job leads to soul-searching that is a lot like after a breakup. Was it me? Could I have done things differently? What will I do now? The old adage of “plenty more fish in the sea” is never clearer than when you have a bunch of them flopping around in your boat already. Lost a job for whatever reason? That’s fine, you’ve got plenty more. It’s like your significant other walking into your harem to dump you.