After the Bell: Everyone’s doing the side-hustle shuffle — just don’t hide your job juggling

One or two or three or four jobs – that’s how we roll these days. And as long as you don’t take the approach of a certain V&A Waterfront staffer, most employers are okay with it.

This is the time of year when Gauteng’s birds are singing slightly earlier, the cats are more interested in the morning, and the dogs start the day hungry.

I was lucky enough, through having the good sense to have wonderful teenagers and long-suffering friends, to end up at not one but two of those over the weekend, giving me a certain lightness for much of today.

A good live musical experience, showcasing all our country has to offer, can keep you cheerful long past the first meeting of the morning.

On the way home from one of those events on Saturday evening, as one does, I fell into conversation with the Uber driver.

I was able to avoid the “where are you from” chat and move immediately to whether he has another job.

Sure enough, he was happy to tell me he worked a nine-to-five job during the week and drove on weekends.

Never mind AI and the virtual world, one of the biggest work trends in the past 20 years is having more than one job.

When I started, in radio journalism, it was literally one job, one notebook and one cellphone (in those more innocent days it had no camera).

Now so many people in journalism, in almost all fields, rush from job to job, doing a variety of bewildering things.

You can manipulate numbers and words and images and information so productively so quickly now, you can do so much more in the day than you did in the Nineties.

In return, our remuneration for that output obviously goes down because it’s cheaper to do.

But corporations – rightly, I think – do hold out against this change.

For many management positions, maybe nearly all of them, you have to be full time, by which I do mean full time and not “full time” with them. You can’t actually go and do something else.