In the meantime, congrats to the lucky recipients of free BizJam passes, listed below, most of whom I had the pleasure of saying hello to at the conference yesterday. I’m sorry I didn’t have more passes to give away, but thank you all for emailing me.

Liz Andrade, CMD+SHIFT DESIGN
Beth Martin Quittman, Samara Lectures
Jen Rotert, Lavish Design Studio
Jenny Zappala, freelance journalist

And thank you BizJam for an excellent conference. (If you’re in the Seattle area, I highly recommend checking it out next year. And if not, see Biznik, an excellent social networking site for indie professionals.) My favorite part of the event was talking to the other enterprising folks between sessions. I also loved that so many people had brought their laptops and were cranking out copy or design between sessions, on deadline. Hilarious. And so fitting.

Have a lovely week!

A marketing director I recently met was kicking herself for recommending a friend for a temporary position doing admin work for her boss.

“Everything started out OK,” said Christie, who works at an arts organization in San Francisco. ” And then the whining started.”

The job was beneath him, didn’t pay enough and wasn’t what he saw himself doing long-term, her ungrateful pal whinged. Then he told Christie that he “would be gone in a month or so.”

Only he didn’t quit. Instead, he stayed on nearly a year, “calling in sick once a week and showing up 30 to 45 minutes late every day,” Christie explained.

But the slacking didn’t stop there. There were the two-hour lunches, the “dental appointments” that required him to leave work early at least three days a week, and the maddening fact that he kept telling Christie about his necessary absences instead of dealing directly with his manager, something Christie was forever reminding him to do.

Read the rest of the article on abcnews.com.

But first, I wanna say, this ain’t yer mama’s biz conference. (Biznik’s motto is “Business networking that doens’t suck” — need I say more?) The first day of the conference is devoted entirely to using social media to grow your biz. The second covers nuts and bolts like raising your rates, negotiating killer contracts, and making sure your website doesn’t suck. (Schedule here.) There’s also an evening shindig on July 10th at the Little Red Studio in downtown Seattle, complete with aerialists, an improv act, food, and booze.

Since I’ll be leading a BizJam session called So You Wanna Be a Published Author? A Primer in Selling Your First Book on the 10th, the good folks at Biznik gave me these “scholarships” to pass along to aspiring and current anti 9-to-5ers in need. To win one of these free passes:

• Email me a short note with your best sob story about your financial woes, boss from hell, freelance struggles, or any other compelling reason why I should give you one of these free passes.
• Swear on your first client’s life that you will go to at least one day of the event and not blow it off. If you have a day job, that means calling in sick.
• Get me your entries by 10 a.m. PST Tuesday, July 8th, which is when I’ll be selecting and notifying the winners — who by the way, will get a nice plug on this here blog, complete with a link to their blog, website, Flickr page, or any other URL they want and a pic of their shiny mug, products, or logo.
• Remember to give me your email address. If you’re a lucky winner, I’ll get you the free conference pass via email. Piece of cake.

Enjoy the fireworks tonight, and try not to lose any fingers!

For me, it means kissing those dreaded dry cleaning bills goodbye and working in my sweatpants. For Harris, a Web programmer I met at a friend’s wedding, it means never having to set the alarm clock again. For my friend Tammy, a marketing maven and mother of two, it means losing the commute and saving a bundle in day care.

Contrary to popular belief, achieving this kind of career autonomy without winding up on food stamps is entirely possible. And it doesn’t even require a four-year college degree or a significant financial investment.

Even better, there’s a rich market of customers just waiting to be tapped.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that more than 12 million people work for themselves. And I can tell you from years of experience in the freelance trenches that many of us self-employed slobs need help with everything from setting up a blog to tracking our business expenses to keeping up with our blasted e-mail in-boxes.

In honor of Independence Day, I’ve outlined five low-cost freelance businesses that you can start from the comforts of your home and market to other independent professionals — plus, the skills, training and overhead they require. See if one lights a firecracker under you.

You can read the rest of the article here, at abcnews.com.

A small business owner I know was recently lamenting the fact that one of his employees constantly brought two friends with her to work: her “girls.”

“She happened to be very well endowed and thought it was a good idea to share her blessings with the rest of the office,” my buddy Joe explained, a bit bewildered.

When the 23-year-old administrator had interviewed for the position, she’d worn a business suit, he said. But after she got the job, she came to work dressed as though she was making the walk of shame from the nearest nightclub: Six-inch-high strappy sandals. Gauzy white skirts, complete with red panties showing through. Low-cut tops that revealed “the girls pushed and pressed, saying ‘howdy!’”

Worried that staff and clients of his four-person creative agency might be uncomfortable with his new hire’s sexy summer wear, Joe solved the problem by instituting an employee dress code.

But his predicament was no anomaly, as anyone who’s ever had a coworker or direct report under age 30 can attest. With “business casual” the de facto dress code in an increasing number of workplaces, and no one 100 percent sure what business casual means anyway, managers find themselves addressing more and more wardrobe malfunctions, especially during the sweltering summer months.

In fact, a June 2008 CareerBuilder.com survey of nearly 2,800 U.S. companies found that 35 percent of employers have sent home an “inappropriately dressed” worker so they could slip into something a little less comfortable.

Everyone knows that in a casual workplace you can get a lot of summertime mileage from a clean pair of khakis and short-sleeved polo shirt (grads, are you listening?). But what if your personal style doesn’t lean toward Tiger Woods or Bill Gates? What threads can you get away with wearing to work when it’s so hot out you’re sweating 20 seconds after you step out of the shower? And which ensembles should you steer clear of no matter how high the mercury rises?

Read the rest of this article on abcnews.com.

She found this ironic — not to mention frustrating — given that her position entailed inspecting job sites filled with tattooed construction workers.

“I was out on site all day, and I wasn’t allowed to show any of my tattoos,” says the 28-year-old Florida native, whose six large tattoos on her arms and back include a brightly colored sunflower, a marigold and a rendition of a Dia de los Muertos bride and groom on her upper left arm. “Ninety-eight degrees and long sleeves is not so cool when you’re in Miami.”

After six years with the construction firm, Champion decided to move north and find an employer that wouldn’t needle her about her body art.

She found her “perfect job” in Danbury, Connecticut, as a project manager at a design and branding agency.

Now, “I have no problem showing up to meet a big client in a T-shirt and jeans,” tattoos in plain view, she says. “I wish more companies were like this.”

You can read the rest of this article by yours truly — complete with suggestions for scoping out a tat-friendly employer — on cnn.com.

Favorite tip(s) from the article:

“Visit the employee parking lot to see how they are dressed and whether many of the employees have visible tattoos,” says the psychologist and founder of Bridgeway Career Development, a career counseling firm in Seattle. “Also ask colleagues and friends if they know anyone who works there who can give you some insider info.”

“The Web is also a gold mine of information,” she says, adding that the Web site ModifiedMind.com, which is dedicated to body art and other modifications, features a database of companies reportedly open to tattoos.

To read the whole article, lookie here.

Thirty-three percent of U.S. companies allow employees to telecommute on a part-time basis, while 21 percent allow it full-time, according to the Society for Human Resource Management.

In other words, although work-at-home jobs do exist, they remain few and far between…

You can read the rest of this abcnews article written by yours truly — complete with tips on how to find a telecommuting-friendly job — here.

Favorite tip from the article:

Rather than waste your time reading scam after scam advertised on Craigslist and through Google ads, see RatRaceRebellion.com, which screens work-at-home job listings and posts the pick of the litter on a daily basis. Run by the authors of The Two-Second Commute: Join the Exploding Ranks of Freelance Virtual Assistants, this site features both “earn a little pocket money” job listings (such as filling out online surveys) and “earn a living” listings (such as transcription and call-center jobs), as well as a list of telecommuting-friendly companies and a goldmine of tips for weeding out work at home scams.

Okay, here’s the rest of the article — for reals.

Mondays through Wednesdays: original blog posts from yours truly

Thursdays: abcnews.com column and/or highlights from the NWjobs.com work/life balance blog

Fridays: highlights from the NWjobs.com work/life balance blog and/or Q&As with or guest blog posts from other relevant bloggers

I know it’s not Thursday anymore, but I wanted to share this week’s abcnews.com column, as it’s a topic people feel so strongly about:

Paternity Leave: When a Week Isn’t Enough

An excerpt:

I’ve always felt the world was divided into two kinds of people: the family-track folks (most of the population), and the holdouts (people like me) who were too busy, too unprepared, or too satisfied with their status quo to raise a child.

Then, one of my fellow holdouts — a friend I’ve known since college — decided to give parenting a whirl. Suddenly, I took great interest in every detail of how she and her husband planned to juggle raising a baby with their office jobs, especially during those first few trying months.

You can read the rest here. Happy dad’s day!

As of May, you can also read me here:

ABCNews.com career column, aimed at cubicle workers. Here’s the current column, on workplace revenge. And here’s a past one, on how to make a case for telecommuting to work, despite the souring economy.

NWjobs.com “Nine to Thrive” blog, featured on the Seattle Times’ career center site and aimed at Northwest folks looking for better balance and a bit more bliss in their work lives. Topics include coworking, baby-friendly workplaces, what not to wear (to work), and more.

Feel free to send ideas for either, as I will be churning this stuff out each week. More from me soon. I’m going back to bed because, at last, I can.

Where: Elliott Bay Book Co (map)

When: Saturday, May 17 @ 4:30 pm

What: Book reading and signing, prizes, and a lively Q&A

I’ll be there. Will you?