Where would you draw the line?

I am hunting for more work again and getting rather tired of doing this again. It seems like it never rains but it pours. This time, instead of losing half my work, I lost about 2/3 of it. I found a nice person to work for who is giving me little bits of work right now while she trains me on all the accounts she needs someone to work on. Problem is, the ol' gray matter ain't what it used to be and having to learn three new accounts at once is rather daunting on top of the couple of accounts I am already doing, and I'm wondering if this is going to work out -- whether this nice lady will hang in there until I get my act together, whether she wishes she hadn't started giving me work, whether my brain is going to stop feeling like mush and I will get my focus back. This is only 1c a line less than I have been making, and I am closer to the pay line I drew a long time ago and said I would never cross.

Of course, the fact that I fell and banged up the entire right side of my body a couple of weeks ago isn't making things any easier. If my wrist doesn't feel better by the end of this coming week, I am going to have no choice but to go in to see if it's broken -- this is the same wrist I shattered in 2000, and if I think too long about being in a cast again, I start crying. I don't want to do that again.

And unfortunately, seeing as though "Uncle Ed" is probably not going to be knocking on my door now (you folks did read the headlines where Ed McMahon got injured and lost his Publishers Clearing House spokesman and other promotional work and is about to have his house foreclosed on, right?), I have to get practical here and figure out a game plan. Retiring is not an option (unless I want to file for bankruptcy LOL). Neither is getting my own accounts or branching out into consulting -- I am not confident enough to do either. At this point I am not sure I could afford to go back to school and don't know what I would take, either, except that possibly I could take a Quickbooks class and a refresher accounting/bookkeeping class and go into bookkeeping or something, but I don't know how realistic that is. I feel trapped, sort of, and am too busy panicking to be able to think clearly about the situation.

Between dropping pay and not working as fast in Windows (and Rae, I ended up having to do Windows on enough accounts for long enough that now working in Open Office I am close enough to my DOS speed that it's not worth losing all the abbvs that start with letters I have maxed out in ST to try to go back), I am down to making about $15 - 20 per hour on the average, usually closer to the $15 than the $20, and I am starting to wonder if it's time to start getting my foot in the door in a regular office part-time so that when the inevitable comes I will already have work experience.

I really wanted to transition to a different at-home career before I was 50, but that milestone passed almost 2 years ago and I have had 3-4 failed attempts at training for a different line of work and have gotten discouraged and sort of given up. But I have this little doggie I got to keep me company with the no-longer-small-fry being gone most of the day, and it wouldn't be fair to her for me to go work full-time outside the house.

I had also looked at a few jobs through agencies to get out of the production typing business, but unfortunately, once you pass a typing test at 90 wpm (I go even faster on my own computer), all people see is the 90 wpm figure and then all of a sudden that other job is no longer available, but they do have openings in the typing pool. I am thinking of discussing this with an agency, telling them what has happened before and asking if I could work my fastest and then they would only tell prospective employers that I typed 65 wpm, or else I was going to deliberately slow myself down so a prospective employer would not get blinded by my typing speed. I wonder how well that would go over.

Evidently there is some place in my city hiring people to do data entry at $12/hr for part-time temp work, which I have done in the past (Before I did proofreading for the typesetting company, I temped doing data entry for two years and was offered permanent full-time work several times, but I couldn't take it because I had young children I was raising during the day). I am sorely tempted to go find out if it's the same type of deal -- pretty much steady temp work from the middle of January through right after Thanksgiving each year -- and then decide whether or not I want to see if I could get hired for that. I could probably handle that pay for part-time work (4 hours a day) for a while in order to get a "regular job" reference, but I couldn't live on that kind of pay permanently or full-time. And I don't see much of anything that anybody would hire me for that pays any better, unless things have changed drastically since 1995 when I was out looking for full-time work after having worked at home for a little over 10 years then. I figure it will only be worse now.

I *really* don't want to go out to work, but I don't know how many more pay cuts I can take until I have to do something else, and I am too scared to get work from only one source because of what has happened in the past when I have, so that limits me as to what I can take. My best friend works for Webmedx, and they currently have my all-time favorite accounts, but they told me that they only hire full-time employees and you have to use their computer, which effectively rules that out for me.

So is there anybody else out there who does not feel that they can expand into consulting or feel like they could take on their own direct-contract accounts with doctors who has ever thought about where they would draw the line of when it's time to get out of MT and what they would move into, and would you mind sharing your thoughts? I would dearly appreciate it.
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