Those Web workers lucky enough to work in a design shop or to have landed an actual corporate job face the fact that the lion's share of their income comes in the form of stock options.

The standard formula there is that your options vest over four years. What that means, to the uninitiated, is that after your first year on the job you can cash-out a quarter of your stock, thereafter you can do so monthly (if you are so inclined) in 1/48th increments.

So, if the majority of your income is based on the future profitability of your hotter-than-July Internet company's stock valuation at any given moment, you had better be on a skyrocket. IF the company tanks after two years, you are S.O.L. Lots of Web workers have found themselves in that latter category.

The housing market you live in as a Web worker has EVERYTHING to do with how well you eat, how often you can afford to go out, whether you own a car or not. When I lived out in Ess Eff, for example, housing was so tight and expensive that you would be willing to spend a third of your income on housing as a natch. San Francisco had a .5% vacancy rate back then. Now my friends back in Cali say that I got out just in time.

The majority of the Web workers of San Francisco's Multimedia Gulch now live outside of the city. I personally know about twenty people who have moved over to the East Bay, to Oakland or Berkeley or Richmond, during the last twelve months. I know San Francisco natives, who have lived in that city all of their lives, who work for software companies and are now relocating to places like Saratoga. (Where?)

I moved from the Upper East Side to Harlem when I lived there and had two other apartment mates in both situations. In Harlem, I was paying $600 a month for a room in a co-op apartment. The room I had in the trendier Upper East Side of Manhattan was more expensive and characterized by friends of mine as "the postage stamp."

NOW GET THIS: To my roommates in Harlem, I was the guy making Big Bucks. I had loaded my plate (overloaded, some people thought) with enough contract writing assignments at that point that I could afford to go out to clubs on a given weekend and take in some of the premier entertainment The City has to offer. There were Web workers in Silicon Alley who considered me one of The Privileged. (They forgot about my tax nut.)

The other issue contract Web workers must face is health-care. If you live in the United States, one of the only countries in the industrialized world that does not provide access to health-care to all of its citizens, this becomes a HUGE CHALLENGE. Unfortunately the challenge is so great that many of us de-prioritize immediate health-care issues. We learn to live with allergies, the need for eye-wear, the threat of Repetitive Stress Syndrome.

For example, I had a friend who works in the theatre lend me a forearm cuff last year to take me through a rough patch of RSS. It helped a lot. I'm on the other side of that right now. Still need to get eyeglasses or contact lenses, of course, but not until my declining vision becomes a problem for my production.