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Mar 01, 2005 No Comments »
I guess such phases descent upon every freelancer’s humble life…you know, one of those things: you don’t deserve the amount you’re charging, so there!
Recently two clients failed to pay even after Okaying the deliverables and implementing them on their websites. One sent an advance but the money never came and upon asked, chose to give me the royal snub.
The other was hit by this sudden surge of wisdom that the amount we had agreed upon was not something she thought she should pay. She very coolly said, now that all the work was done, that my work was not great anyway, and since she had already paid an advance, that should be considered as a sufficient compensation. If she felt, she might pay some more once she had sufficient funds in her PayPal account. How generous of her!
In the first client’s case there wasn’t much loss. I realized it very early that the advance wasn’t actually the real, the coming sort of advance. He said he’d post the check to me (the bank takes around a month to process the international checks) and once I received it, I would start the work. I’d get the rest of the amount once the whole work was done. Various communication gaps kept delaying the project, and eventually I discovered that the advance never transformed into the divine form of hard cash. After thoroughly blaming me for the failure of the project, and after my queries about the advance, he stopped corresponding.
The PayPal lady, on the other hand, painted this “damsel in distress” picture and made me complete her work in a hurry. Not only that, since she was using some online site building tool to create pages, her website was in complete mess by the time I created the page (I volunteered to do that as a goodwill gesture). I not only wrote the optimized content for her page, I also organized her web pages, spending one-and-a-half hours. She accepted everything, and made me re-shuffle her pages. I think she messed up her main page on purpose so that she could make me feel guilty about the whole thing and then make me organize all her pages because she didn’t know a thing about that site building tool. When the work was complete, she was quite content (we were using the Yahoo! messenger). She told me, since there were no funds in her PayPal account, I should remind her about the remaining payment after a few days. When I reminded her, her view point of my abilities had gone through a complete transformation. I not only did a bad job of the content (she had to ‘hold my hand’ all the way), I also almost ruined her website.
I felt bad for a while. It hurts when you spend time on some work and then don’t get paid for it. It’s a double sort of loss. You not only lose the money for the work, you also lose the money for the time you could have spent doing some other, paying work. Anyway, these things are bound to happen and I’m psychologically prepared for them.
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