My own boss

‘I found it hard working really long hours when I was my own boss. The boss kept giving me the afternoon off. Sometimes he gave me the morning off as well. Sometimes he’d say, “Look, you’ve worked pretty hard today, why don’t you take a well-earned rest tomorrow”. If I overslept he never rang me to ask where I was; if I was late to my desk he always happened to turn up at exactly the same time; whatever excuse I came up with, he always believed it. Being my own boss was great. Being my own employee was a disaster’
(Opening lines of John O’Farrell’s hilarious novel, The Best a Man Can Get [Black Swan, 2000])

Fellow research students in particular, does this sound familiar?