Downside #30

Professional Rivalry

As in every profession, it's natural to keep an eye on how your fellow workers are doing. When you're freelance, though, the element of competition is blown right out of proportion - if someone else has got a job, it means you haven't, which essentially means they'll eat that week/month and you won't. And as every job you get gives you a better chance of getting the next one, you're constantly surveying your rivals to see who's where on the great freelance food chain, trying to spot the gaps, grinding your teeth for every extra notch on someone else's bookshelf, firing off frantic emails for any pitiful hack work that comes along just to try and beat that fucking guy who always somehow gets there fucking first. Of course the ones you do get will then somehow prevent you from taking the next thing that comes along, which will be ten times more exciting, a hundred times better paid and a million rungs up the career ladder, and will of course go to the colleague now known as That Fucking Guy. They should produce figures on the numbers of byline-related murders every year, it'd make interesting reading. But guess who'd get to compile them?