Free Agent Nation

The concept eludes some. About a year ago Risi applied for a mortgage. The bank demanded to see every scrap of paper about her life and her finances, because a woman without a "job" was, in its old-economy view, an obvious credit risk.

"I showed them my resume and said, 'You're kidding me! I've been at Apple, Pacific Bell, Cullinet Software -- all these high-tech companies. You're telling me that I would be a safer bet at one of those than I am with six active clients? If one of my clients goes away, I'm still going to make my payments. But if I'm employed by Apple and they let me go, I'm out on the street.'"

She got her loan.

"Unless you're into self-abuse, or you're incredibly lucky and avoid restructuring," says Risi, "being a lifer is no longer an option."

As you take to the highways found on the new map of work, you'll soon learn the foremost rule of the road: freedom is the pathway to security, not a detour from it.

Like many free agents, I'm looking for el dorado. el dorado, New Mexico, that is. That's where you'll find June Walker, 53, a free agent who lives in an adobe house in this tiny, nonincorporated area eight miles outside of Santa Fe. A tax and finance consultant, she advises other free agents on the intricacies and frustrations of the tax code. She says that if free agency changes the old equation between security and freedom -- the either-or proposition of what Walker acidly calls the "W-2 world" -- then the next challenging issue it raises goes straight to the heart of the matter: Why work?

"Free agency forces you to think about who you are and what you want to do with your life," she says. "Previously, it was only those wonderful, flaky artists who had to deal with this."

The old social contract didn't have a clause for introspection. It was much simpler than that. You gave loyalty. You got security. But now that the old contract has been repealed, people are examining both its basic terms and its implicit conditions.

Free agents quickly realized that in the traditional world, they were silently accepting an architecture of work customs and social mores that should have crumbled long ago under the weight of its own absurdity. From infighting and office politics to bosses pitting employees against one another to colleagues who don't pull their weight, most workplaces are a study in dysfunction. Most people do want to work; they don't want to put up with brain-dead distractions. Much of what happens inside companies turns out to be about . . . nothing. The American workplace has become a coast-to-coast "Seinfeld" episode. It's about nothing.

But work, free agents say, has to be about something. And so, instead of accepting the old terms, they're demanding new ones. Thus the second rule of the road for navigating Free Agent, USA: work is personal. You can achieve a beautiful synchronicity between who you are and what you do.

"A large organization is about submerging your own identity for the good of the company," says David Garfinkel, 44, from his apartment in San Francisco. "People have their game faces on." A few years ago, when he was a bureau chief for business publisher McGraw-Hill, Garfinkel decided he couldn't play that game any longer. "The appearance and title of the job were exciting, but the job wasn't using the best part of me. I felt like I was out of touch with who I really was." He's now a free-agent marketing strategist and copywriter.

Across the Bay, Sue Burish -- a beefy, boisterous Oakland-based free agent who goes by the unlikely nickname of "Birdi" -- concurs. "In traditional companies," she says, "people don't believe in themselves. How they act is so frequently not who they are. They put on masks for eight hours and then take them off when they're done."

Free agents gladly swap the false promise of security for the personal pledge of authenticity. "In free agency," says Burish, who now designs training programs, "people assume their own shape rather than fit the shape of some corporate box."

Burish, 45, knows about corporate boxes. She began her career in the mid-1970s, selling Parker pens. Since then she's worked at Southern Pacific Railroad, at Crocker Bank, and, for more than seven years, at Raychem Corp., the large electronics manufacturer.

"I have been riffed, merged, and bankrupted into unemployment," she says of her corporate life. But as a free agent for the last two years, she's been something altogether new: she's been whole. "I used to think that what I needed to do was balance my life, keep my personal and professional lives separate," she says. "But I discovered that the real secret is integration. I integrate my work into my life. I don't see my work as separate from my identity." The mask is gone. For this free agent, work is who she is.

And just as the first rule of the road leads to the second, the second yields the third: Work is fun.