(WARNING: If you love Facebook and can’t live without it, please take your eyes from this post. I am about to explain why and how much I dislike it.)

I was active on Facebook for almost nine years between November 2008 and October 2017. During that time, I went from being fascinated with it to hating it. On October 5, 2017, I deleted my profile and account completely and have not returned to the platform since. I have never regretted this decision or attempted to come back. Please let me explain why.

1. It was a big time-waster. I often spent an hour or more scrolling and reading when I had more important things to do. At one point, I had to limit my Facebook time by saying, “You cannot be on Facebook from X hour to Y hour.” That limit was often difficult to stick to, because the platform was so addictive to me.
2. The content made me very stressed. People were posting all kinds of bad news on Facebook and articles about things to avoid and watch out for and be concerned and stressed about. And I bet that half of it was untrue.
3. The comments people made on other people’s posts were unbelievable sometimes. I had to ask, “Do you talk that way in real life?”
4. The ugly, hate-filled replies to a few of my own comments, written by people I didn’t know from Adam. Apparently, I “hate liberty and freedom” and “just want attention,” according to some folks who have never even met me and don’t know what I have been through.
5. The polarized political opinions that many people posted. Obviously, if you don’t have the guts to say it to someone’s face, write it on Facebook, right?
6. The ubiquitous memes, many of which were just plain awful.

These days, I use LinkedIn as my social media of choice. It was meant to be professional in nature when it was created, but some see it as another Facebook. I also use YouTube quite a bit, although I rarely comment on videos because it seems I always regret doing so. I have never used Snapchat or TikTok, and that shows my age.

Which social media platforms do you love and/or dislike?

N.B. Next weekend, I will be away from the blog (and my home). I wish all my readers a happy and safe weekend, and I will return to the blog on August 11.

Let me start off this week’s post by saying that if you are unemployed right now…I’m sorry.

I feel your pain. I was long-term unemployed myself in the past and those days were very dark. The grueling job applications…the frightening interviews…the rejection emails…I’ve been there. Please remember that you are not worthless or a loser.

If you have a friend or family member who is unemployed, it is tempting to say certain things to try to encourage them (“try” being the operative word). I would like to ask you to please refrain from telling them the following:

“How’s the job search going?” (Painfully, I am sure. And they probably don’t want to talk about it.)

“How did that interview go?” (If they really want you to know, they will tell you.)

“Have you heard from that job yet?” (If they had, they would have told you by now.)

“You should try looking on [insert name of job search engine here].” (Chances are that they already have looked.)

“When one door closes, another opens.” (This is the oldest cliché in the book.)

“Maybe God doesn’t want you to have a job right now. Maybe He wants you to be a missionary.” (Yes, someone actually said this to me once.)

“You should try applying at [insert name of low-paying entity here]. I hear they pay good money.” (Stop. Just stop.)

“Maybe people think you’re overqualified.” (It’s not like they can do anything about it.)

“Have you ever thought about going back to school?” (With whose money? Now more than ever, they need it to put food on their table.)

“You can’t buy a new pair of shoes. You don’t have a job.” (Yes, someone actually said this to me once as well. If you don’t have enough manners to not say this, you probably should not be a member of society.)

If you spent time unemployed, what atrocities did you hear?

In one corner of the bulletin board that hangs on the wall above my work desk, I have an inspirational postcard which was sent to me a few years ago by a beloved childhood friend. It has a picture of a rainbow and reads “Better Days Ahead.”

Let’s just say that these days, I look at it a lot.

With the exception of the month of May, the time period from March up to and including the present day has seen business dry up for the most part. It’s not because my clients are ditching me—none of them have. It’s because they simply have not had work for me to do. Everyone who is in the independent editing business knows that work is either “feast or famine,” to use a tired cliché, and that the income is not steady.

It has not been often that I do my books at the end of the month and see that my expenses outweighed my earnings. But that is what happened in June.

However, I do believe what that postcard says—there are better days ahead.

The retail company for whom I edit is gearing up to begin creating its yearly catalogs, and in the fall and early winter, those keep me quite busy (and earn me quite a bit). The company will also be redesigning its website soon, and that will give me a lot of work to do next year, since there are many pages on the site.

The university for whom I edit scientific research manuscripts is getting ready to launch a public relations campaign to encourage more researchers to use its editing service.

Right now, I am researching biochemistry and biology departments at various R01 research universities and sending cold emails to department chairs, offering my editing services for their department’s manuscripts. This takes a lot of courage and thick skin. I have thus far received one response, consisting of eight words: “Please remove my name from your mailing list.”

Still, I carry on. Eventually one of them will show interest in my services.

Fellow freelance editors, what do you do to encourage yourself when you are down?

Does anyone out there still use USB (Universal Serial Bus) drives?

I don’t often use them, but I do if I am writing something like a blog post, which I don’t want cluttering up my cloud storage. Right now, I am saving this post on a USB drive, which contains all of my posts since May 5. Before that date, I was using another USB drive to save my blog posts and it went bad. See? That’s the problem with USB drives.

Between about 2010 and 2019, I only used USB drives to save my material. I have a small collection of USB drives which now are almost never touched. These drives contain old cover letters that I wrote as part of job applications, old blog posts, and even chapters of a novel I wrote about ten years ago which is badly in need of a developmental editor. It is embarrassing to admit this, because many people were using cloud storage before I was. I was the one with the little stick protruding from the side of her laptop (or, before that, from the front of her minitower).

About a year after I started my editing business, I was introduced to Dropbox. Dropbox has been a lifesaver for me. More than a terabyte of storage for whatever I want to put into it, and it’s all for me. When I first began talking to my husband about cloud storage, he asked me, “Where exactly is ‘the cloud’?”

“The cloud,” I explained, “is in Heaven. Imagine everyone owning a piece of Heaven—their very own piece, and they can put whatever files they want into their piece. That’s the best way I can explain cloud storage.”

USB drives, unlike the cloud, have very limited storage capability by comparison, and as I said before, they can fail without warning. It was only a matter of time before they became obsolete; the laptop which my husband bought this past March doesn’t even have a USB port.

Once my old USB drives all fail, I might make Christmas ornaments out of them.

If you have USB drives lying around, what do you do (or what have you done) with them?