Freelancing for Paris from Beirut: generator hours, a UPS and the bank that ate my savings

hi kifak, ça va? People ask how I work for French and German clients from here. Short answer: around the generator. Long answer below 🙃

Electricity. State power comes some hours a day, when it comes. The rest is the neighbourhood generator, the "ishtirak", a subscription you pay to a guy with a very big diesel engine and a very big network of cables over the street. It switches over a few times a day and every switch is a few seconds of nothing. So: UPS for the desktop, a small DC UPS for the router, laptop always charged. When the generator owner takes his lunch break, I take mine.

Meetings. I put my calls inside generator hours. My clients do not know this, they just think I am "not available at 15h". Merci, async culture.

Getting paid. In 2019 the banks froze our dollar accounts. My savings are still there, on a screen. We call them "lollars": Lebanese dollars that exist only in the bank app. You can withdraw them at a fraction of their value, which is like not withdrawing them. So now I never keep client money in a local bank. Clients pay into a fresh account and I move it fast. I trust banks the way I trust a regex someone else wrote.

The port. August 2020 blew out my windows. I was on a call. The client heard it, asked if I was okay, then asked if the deadline was still Friday. Ya3ne, I laugh about it now, mostly.

What actually helps, if you are in a similar country:

• Batteries for the network, not only the laptop. The laptop has a battery already, the router does not.
• Tell clients your hours, not your reasons. They do not need the generator story. They need "I reply between 9 and 18 Paris time".
• Record Loom videos for demos when the power is good, so a power cut does not kill a demo.
• Never keep more than one month of money in a place that can freeze it.

بيروت بتضل حلوة. Even with the cables 🇱🇧