Perfect Job

At this time in my life, I have without-a-doubt the perfect job. My work fits itself snugly into my lifestyle. I don't need to change my normal sleep schedule, so I'm awake at 2 am and rarely wake up before 10 am. It gives me lots of flexibility for when I want to work, since I'm often getting exercise during the day, watching movies, visiting friends or writing blog posts. It gives me a decent pay for when I want to work, since I work by an hourly-wage as opposed to fixed salary and long hours.

Wonder what it is?

Let's play a game to guess what I do:
My work necessitates having a computer and internet connection.
I rarely go into an office - I work from home or from cafes.
I have fixed meeting times, although there's plenty of offline work to do.
I can wake up 10 minutes before I need to be at an online appointment.
Meetings can be one-on-one or with groups of people.
I meet with clients, via real-time internet interaction, in typically 30 minute to 1.5 hour sessions.
I help clients with their needs.
Sometimes I wear a shirt. Sometimes I wear pants.

Any guesses?


Thus far, the stripper-web camera/sex industry sounds like a pretty likely candidate...

...

Haha, no I'm not a internet stripper/porn star or anything related to sex. My job isn't odd or exceptional like that. I just wanted to make you all think for a moment that maybe I did.

Since I don't want to identify the company I work for, this description will be a little vague: I work for an international biomedical technology association. I work within their online division, that teachers doctors, clinicians, psychologists and researchers how to use the medical equipment & software, along with designing new treatment protocols with/for them and networking international research teams.

My personal role is meeting with these doctors/clinicians/researchers to either teach them to use the equipment and software, design new protocols or create new courses to be taught. Most of my work is online meetings or offline preparation for them, but occasionally I do meet people in person to show them directly how to do it all. I use a lot of Skype and another program that lets people see my desktop or lets me control their computer by proxy over the internet. Everyone hears everyone else's voice, but rarely do we use web cameras.


I also get to complete at random projects too, such as a "Generic Brochure Photoshoot"

I really love my work because I can choose when to attend an online meeting, I don't need to commute to work, I can work from downtown in a coffee shop almost whenever I feel like it and I get to interaction with big names in the medical world and in the international community. Officially, the company is in the Netherlands, so I deal a lot with Europeans, but also many Canadians and Americans, S. African, Australians, Chinese, Brazilians, among others. My favorite clients are definitely the Germans who make up the Stress and Hypertension teams. A close second is a man and woman who treat "troubled youth" in Michigan. Both groups are always really friendly and funny. Because it's usually voice-only interaction, it's a great advantage for me to be taken serious by older professionals, who (unfortunately) otherwise wouldn't give me such credit if they met me in person.

My old "office", the floor

Of course, I'm not always serious. From time to time I replace my 23 year old image with that of a 31 year old, recently married Dutch man, with a child on the way. More than once, I've been in the situation where I'm explaining how to use a specific sensor to a hot-shot, big name individual in his/her field, while only wearing my boxers. Ah, the joys of people not seeing my face.

A second great part of the work is that all my coworkers (well, coworkers over the internet) are my friends. My boss hired me 16 months ago. Over the last year he has needed to hire more people, so I've given out jobs to 5 friends and acquaintances. Alicia was one of them, although she left because of med school. Plenty of meetings just turn into payed joking time since 4 of us get online, with my super cool boss, and we pretty much just keep making fun of each other. We also occasionally meet up at someone's apartment to work in a group for the day. Those tend to be the least productive days, since after 2 hours it degrades into us playing Smash Brothers.

My friend at work with a beer

I won't be staying with this job for another full year, so I'm going to take advantage of this experience (and the goofing off it allows me) while I can. Am I making anyone else jealous out there?