Ah, yes. The classic assumption: working from home means sitting on your arse all day, doing absolutely nothing. Lovely theory. Shame reality isn’t quite so simple.
Running a holistic site—teas, coffees, wellness bits and bobs—without fancy integrations is a full-contact sport. Every order has to be manually processed: checking names and addresses, updating stock, prepping shipments, and making sure nothing explodes in the wrong customer’s lap. Then comes the “invisible” work: drafting B2B emails, coordinating with partners, juggling content updates, fixing plugin tantrums, and generally preventing the website from collapsing into digital chaos.
One of my suppliers has introduced integrations. Fantastic, right? Except the background work hasn’t gotten any less tedious. I still have to reconcile orders, check everything in the backend, and work on my portfolio in the supplier system so the integration runs smoothly. Automation helps, but it doesn’t replace mental gymnastics.
And caffeine? With neurodivergent needs, it often hits differently—sometimes sending me straight to sleep mid-email. Quiet focus does not equal lounging; it usually looks like intense concentration while physically still.
Customer service doesn’t take a holiday either: soothing confused customers, sorting missing or delayed items, and reconciling returns. Then there’s marketing and analytics: tracking performance, tweaking product pages, updating banners, planning promotions, and keeping the brand coherent. Add in creative work—designing new products, updating visuals—and constant learning to troubleshoot integrations, plugins, and e-commerce quirks.
There are always people who assume you’re useless without knowing what you do. Maybe they’ve never done office work either—apparently sitting in a chair all day counts as “real work,” while meticulous, invisible effort is ignored.
So, if you think I’m doing nothing, take a wee look behind the curtain. The “quiet” worker is usually holding an entire operation together, juggling spreadsheets, emails, backend portfolios, customer queries, marketing campaigns, and the occasional existential crisis over whether a plugin update will destroy the whole site.
And to anyone acting superior—imagine how smug you’d feel if I were earning millions per month. Spoiler: I’m not. I aim for steady, regular income from repeat customers—enough to live comfortably while actually enjoying the work I do.
Sitting on my arse all day? Right, sure. Next, you’ll be telling me breathing counts as a career.
And for anyone who thinks I’m specifically talking about them—well, maybe I am, maybe I’m not. Either way, don’t take it personally. This is about exposing misconceptions, not handing out grudges.
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