This story was co-published and supported by the journalism non-profit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

I woke at 6:30 AM for my first gig in Chelsea at 9. Showered, shat, and shaved to be out the door by 6:50. I grabbed a bagel, still saliva-inducingly warm, from the oven and hoofed it up the platform to find the 7 Train wasn’t running into Manhattan. That meant it was the bus to Queensboro Plaza, which had me arrive at 9:13, late for the first job of the day.

This was my first three-gig day on the freelancer app Handy, and so I was packing a full range of tools, anticipating the unexpected. All three of the jobs were furniture assembly, but I had already learned that add-on jobs were the norm. People seemed to take it for granted that as long as you’re in their home you may as well look at the light, or the furnace, or the door that won’t shut properly. Jobs often go over the time limit, so I booked these three two-hour gigs, spaced two hours apart, in order to make sure I was on time to each one.

For years, I had work in the art fair world waiting for me. I live in Thailand most of the year and could time my visits back to New York to coincide with my former employer’s crush time. I would get off the plane and the next day descend into a work orgy for twelve plus hours a day, 6 days a week for two months. The job was both difficult and taxing. It involved both delicacy and brute strength, using the most sensitive of tools as well as forklifts and J-bars. It’s a job I had done for a long time, one that I was very good at and well paid for.

Being frugal, I lived for the rest of the year on that 4 months of work in my little house by the River Kwai in Kanchanaburi. I’m single with no children, and so never worried much about having little money, nor gave much thought to what would happen when my system failed, which it has. After years of following bad business practices and taking customers for granted, my former employer and his business partner/office manager drove what should have been an unbreakable business so deep into the red they had no choice but to declare bankruptcy and shut down, leaving unpaid debts across the planet.

At first, I thought I would be able to stroll into any business similar to the one I had worked at for 20 years and get a job on the spot. I thought wrong. When I tried, I was offered insulting terms: hourly pay rates that were less than my first job in the business in 1995. As I mulled this over, a friend said that his brother was making between $600 and $800 a week on an app called TaskRabbit doing odd jobs.

I knew his brother, and the idea of anyone paying him to do anything seemed absurd until I looked into this TaskRabbit thing, a name so internet cutesy I knew I could never work under that banner. Turns out that TaskRabbit was basically doing basic shit for people they couldn’t be bothered to do themselves. Laundry, cleaning, shopping, standing in line; watching over a stroller while some millennials took their baby for lunch in a chic Brooklyn bistro.

Handy sounded a bit different though. It was electrical, light construction, hanging pictures, and lots of furniture assembly. It wasn’t things people didn’t want to do, but that they couldn’t, and although wiring an out-of-the-box light is pretty far from my unique skill set, it was better than scrubbing some slouch’s shitty drawers.

So I signed up and started taking work.

Job 1: 9 AM

My first stop was a small one-bedroom condo with an obscured view of the Hudson River and Jersey City beyond. The job was assembling an Ikea split side, six-drawer table. The box it came in was as big as the client and promised a truckload of parts and hardware that would be explained by diagrams clear as mud, with instructions translated from the original Swedish into 7 languages by an app.

When putting these things together, it’s important to remember that the instructions are only there to confound, and that generally these pressboard contraptions are pretty self-explanatory if you lay out all of the pieces. The tiny kitchen alcove didn’t provide the space for that, though, and so I arranged the work in the best place available, inches from a diaper bucket. Meanwhile the client played with her loudly crying baby, pretending I wasn’t trying to concentrate ten feet away.

Making good progress early on, I was stymied for a bit by some multifunctional bracket when her husband came home, the door opening into my lower back and scattering wooden dowels and fasteners of all makes across the floor. “You the Handy guy?” he asked in lieu of an apology. Stepping around me he joined his wife, collapsing on the couch to recount his early morning CrossFit session.

The apartment was warm when I arrived and had become steadily more uncomfortable with the two of them yacking over the screaming baby while I tried to work steadily in order to make my time limit. When I was finished, I packed up my tools, cut the bulky cardboard box and separators into pieces people who do CrossFit early on a Saturday morning can handle, and told them I was done. The husband checked his watch with a look that said “we paid for two hours and you only worked an hour and 45 minutes?" He was approximately 15 years younger than I.

While leaving the building I checked the job as being finished on the app. My next gig was at MetroTech in Brooklyn, an easy two-train trip away, so I sat down for an early lunch at a typical Chinese place still undergoing its opening ritual. I checked the app, which provides the choicest route walking, riding or training along with ETA. I ate my Kung Po and headed for the C train.

Job 2: 1 PM

When I arrived at the Jay Street stop I followed the walking map which took me straight out of the order and security of MetroTech to 45 Fleet Walk, the Ingersoll houses. The P.J.’s— and these were the projects proper, the projects circa 1988, an old-school scene from my childhood with broken-down cars, chain link fences, basketball nets, and walls tagged up not with the flowing ironic graffiti of New Brooklyn but with scrawls that warned of gang affiliations. This was a Brooklyn I thought gentrification had bought out to the distant corners of Brownsville and Canarsie.

Lost as soon as I entered the compound of identical ashy brick buildings, I called the client, since there were neither building numbers nor street names. “I better come down and get you,” she said sweetly on the phone, and then seconds later I heard her calling out “Handyman, Mr. Handyman, over here.” When we met she looked me over and said smiling, “Oh, you the handyman.” It was neither a question nor a statement, it was a fact; who else could I possibly be in that situation?

It was my first time in a housing project apartment in probably two decades. A disheveled two- or three-bedroom place that was home to five generations, it was cramped and smelled faintly of fried food. Again, I was brought into a kitchen squeezed into a too-small space. This time the piece was a white glass-and-mirror china hutch that stood over 7 feet tall. I could tell by the box that it was a piece of junk, badly designed and cheaply made, and was going to be that much harder to piece together because of it.

I unpacked some tools onto the kitchen table next to the Kool-aid and Wonder Bread while the client filmed me with her phone, something that would have seen me walk out on another job, but her enthusiasm and genuine thanks buffered that reaction. She wasn’t being ironic, she was excited. I got to work. Family members old and young came through the kitchen; an old man in a bathrobe eyed me suspiciously while searching the fridge before returning from wherever he had come, empty-handed.

I finished a few minutes early; the thing was a mess, but the client was stunned. She called whomever had gifted her the eyesore to thank them for both it and me. Turns out my service was an add-on from the website that sold this crap. I was bought and sold electronically, which also answered my question of why this woman had engaged the Handy service at $40 an hour to assemble a $100 hutch.

From Brooklyn it was up to midtown, 240 East 39. A towering, stately building with a retinue of doormen guarding the entrance. Normally any type of manual laborer is sent to slink through the service entrance in buildings like these, but when I mentioned the client’s name and showed I had no other equipment but my tool bag I was waved to the concierge desk. There, I was informed the client was out at the time, even though I had texted her to say I would be early.

Job 3: 3 PM

Apt. 52 C is a duplex penthouse. I was whisked up to the private floor in a highly polished wood and copper box by a man who, though he wore the uniform of a servant, made no move to supplicate himself to me. He sensed right off that I was a peon, even lower than himself.

I was greeted at the door by a heavily pregnant, modelesque twenty-something blonde woman dressed in designer maternity wear. She dispensed quickly with any niceties and pointed out my two jobs. The first was a rocking chair she called a “feeding chair,” and then warned me she had had to return one already since the last Handy man had cracked it during a botched assembly.

The other was a ten-foot-long glass-topped cabinet that she informed was to go into the nursery on the second floor. Just as there is lower quality than Ikea flat packed furniture, there is also higher to much higher. I knew this brand, so I knew the box would weigh a ton. It would have to be moved in pieces. Ten or maybe 12 trips up and down her gracefully curved staircase, “and do be careful.”

The rocking / feeding chair was a piece of piss and knocked off easily enough. When I had it together, with all the little tabs inset and Velcro cushions adhered to the correct arms, I got to work opening the cabinet box. Bags of hardware and reams of instructions spewed out as I split the side open with my razor knife. The pieces inside were numerous, vividly white, perforated with holes of four or five different diameters. It wasn’t going to be easy.

It was then she told me I would have to leave while she went to the groomer in order to pick up her dog, since she strangely had no help that I could see. No maid, butler, girl or gofer—though she did have a handyman. She would only be ten minutes, she told me, and this is when I told her that the cabinet was not going to be finished in an hour and was really a job for two.

We worked out a deal that I would get an extra $40 to finish the job. I was sent to the lobby for the half an hour or so it took her to return with the miniature doodle-dog scrubbed clean and freshly groomed. I humped the pieces upstairs and got to work sorting through the intricacies of the cabinet’s origami-like assemblage.

When I was finished an hour and a half later she shooed me through the door, reluctantly handing me a forty-dollar check, with a warning that her husband would be home anytime. As if I were the Fuller Brush man making an unscheduled visit.

By the time I made the various train connections home it was an 11-hour day. My net pay came to $120 minus expenses; subtract $16.50 in train fare, plus an eight-dollar lunch, and I had netted under $10 an hour, on a Saturday. In 1995, as a 25 year old art handler-installer working in the city off the back of my bike, I made at least $25 an hour and easily took $300 to $400 a week in tips.

During the 1990s almost every artist, musician, singer, actor, and writer I knew worked freelance in some way or another. Many were under the table bartenders and waitstaff making real money on straight tips, others were bike messengers when that was still a job and not a fashion, but there were plenty of us working casual, skilled labor that afforded a good living. To work a 9 to 5 job, for most of us, was unthinkable. The unions were as dead as the idea of job loyalty, and signing on to a company for 30 years was equally unthinkable.

Not that it would have been an option for us. We were the overeducated roughnecks who made gallery openings, museum shows, and auctions possible in ways the moneyed patrons who attended such events could never understand.

It was a good feeling to ride over the bridges from where we lived in Long Island City, Fort Greene, or Bushwick when those places were still almost affordable into the mess of pre-bike lane Manhattan traffic and own the Avenues, running lights, cutting through bustling crosswalks to get to a gig in Chelsea or the upper east side on time. To do a job that few people could, and have the freedom to walk out on any dealer or registrar that didn’t understand who was actually in charge.

There were no health plans or 401(k)s. Nothing was guaranteed, except that if you did good work, you would keep working. The lazy, inept, and precious were vetted out. The work was often hard both physically and mentally and at times we worked 50, 60 even 70 hours with no sleep and little to eat to make sure the rich could buy their baubles.

In 1998 a pilled-out client paid me $1,000 one afternoon to come to her beach house in Southampton to look at a piece that had just been delivered. She sent her driver who also brought me home, yet I still resented doing it. At times she would tip me by handing me all the cash in her wallet, regardless of if it was hundreds or tens of dollars.

Today, digital platforms sit in the middle of that relationship. They own the customer, the payment system and, increasingly, your reputation. 20 years of experience is compressed into a star rating given by someone who doesn’t understand the work in the first place. Your labor is measured, compared, and priced by software that knows exactly how many other people are willing to do the same job.

Now I stay in Thailand full time, playing hide and seek with the immigration authorities and scraping out a living in the e-gig economy online, but from a place where five dollars can still buy lunch. I’m no longer competing with the handyman in Queens or the installer in Brooklyn. I’m bidding against teachers in the Philippines, writers in India, and programmers in Eastern Europe for clients in China and the former Soviet Union who bargain just as hard for the lowest price in Yuan, Rubles, Euros, or Bitcoin.

Maybe this is simply what work looks like now. The app doesn’t know whether you’ve spent twenty years mastering a trade or watched three YouTube videos the night before. It knows only whether someone else is willing to do it for less. The gig economy didn’t invent freelance work. It found a way to capitalize on it: taking away the freedom and profits we freelancers once had, putting us on a schedule, and monetizing our skills with no equal reimbursement. The development of Web 2.0 will do for knowledge work what Handy did for manual labor. The same technology that allows me to compete for work from a village in Thailand allows someone in Nairobi or Bangalore to compete with me. That is unquestionably good for them, and often good for the client, even though it’s not for me.

The farther work moves from the physical world, the more it becomes a global auction. Someone still has to change tires, cut hair, and bake bread. The future may belong to algorithms, but someone still has to carry the cabinet up twelve flights of stairs. The difference is that now the algorithm decides what that work is worth.

John McMahon is a painter and writer who’s spent 25 years writing fiction and non-fiction, researching complex subjects, interviewing people, publishing across multiple industries, building websites, running small businesses, and traveling far and wide.