Sometimes working at home is really hard for me. Lately it’s being ridiculously exhausted, but there have been a lot of other challenges too. But that doesn’t mean I let them get to me.

It’s rather like being told “may you live in interesting times” and being grateful for the opportunity, not worried about the potential negatives to being in “interesting times.”

So many things that might have come easy to me have first come with a challenge. When I started out in medical transcription, I was their first Windows XP transcriptionist due to the death of the computer I’d had when I started the application process. I had to wait for their software to be updated to work for me.

Finally we were able to set a start date.

I go to log into the system on my telephone. At that time, most dictation came over the phone lines, not the internet as they generally do now.

No dial tone.

So I call the phone company. They guy says I’ve been disconnected but really doesn’t want to tell me why. Obviously I’m furious, and being rather pregnant at that time, quite capable of saying so.

It took a few calls to finally get someone to send me over to security, who tells me that my line was disconnected for fraud.

Yes, really.

That I’d been paying the bill already didn’t matter. They knew the account was fraudulent because the account had the social security number that belonged to a different customer, name of Stephen Foster. All quite reasonable in light of the fact that they contacted him and he knew nothing of me. It’s a classic way to do that sort of fraud, I gather, to use just a slight variation of the name.

Only problem was, I hadn’t given that number as my SSN. I’d used my own and I knew it. I also knew exactly how the problem had happened as I was a previous employee of the phone company and knew the software used for new accounts. When a name and SSN were punched in for the credit check, and the system didn’t find a match for the SSN, it would bring up similar names with the SSN for that name. I was able to tell security that that was clearly what had happened.

The person didn’t believe me at first, but she finally did check into it. I think the pregnancy hormones helped, as I was rather more… insistent… than usual. She came back really apologetic and I got my connection back after making sure they had all my right info.

And my boss had to admit that I had the most unique excuse for not starting work that she had ever heard!

Now I could have given up and just done… I don’t even know what. I don’t process the idea of giving up that well sometimes, even when I think I might want to. Starting to work as a medical transcriptionist should have been quite a bit easier at that point, but it turned into what was at the time a very stressful event. These days it’s funny but back then, anything but!

I look at my business the same way. Some of the things I think I’m going to be able to get done, no problem, turn out to be incredibly difficult because something or other eats away at my time until it’s all gone. That doesn’t mean it’s time to give up. That means it’s time to give the challenges hell until something happens.

It might not be the exact results I want but where in this business do you get the exact results you want anyhow? Only thing I know for sure that I’m getting for finishing this blog post, for example, is a finished blog post. It doesn’t guarantee me readers, income or instant fame.

All I can do is trust that I’m on the right path to steadily building my income to where I want it to be. I’m not there yet, but I will get there. Somehow. Someday.