Wasted effort, wasted time…

Well, this past week has been by far the most frustrating week, since moving to the US.  The irony is, these frustrations were caused by some guy in the UK!

Last week, I made contact with a prospective contract to do some work for him.  The original scope for the work was to markup and style his design, write a bunch of Ajax interactions, as well as redesigning and developing a backend to replace the existing backend.  So far, so good.

After two days of discussions, he decided he wanted to use my services and asked me to quote for the full scope of the application, after asking for an estimate the day before.  The day I deliver the full quote, I am informed that I likely won’t get the backend and Ajax work, as the client has decided to stick with the company that wrote the original backend, so already I’ve wasted a few hours in scoping and quoting the project, not to mention losing 2/3 or the potential income from this project.  No biggy, he can’t control the client now, can he?

Then, he asks me to markup one page so he can see whether I have the goods.  Stupidly, I agree, feeling confident that after completing the single page build, he will give me the contract.  This is where things start to unwravel.

He had told me right from the get go that he was super anal about the layout matching the design perfectly, down to the very last pixel, in every browser.  This is something that comes as no surprise, but most designers don’t mind if things are a pixel or two off.  This guy seems to be the exception.

After some five or six hours, I’ve finished with the initial build.  It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty close and more than enough to display my talents.  How wrong I was!  I was promptly told to go back and make it perfect.  So I spent another two or three hours and tightened up a whole bunch of stuff.  On presentation, the response is the same, only this time it’s accompanied by a 10-point list of fixes he wants to see.

At this point, having spent a day on the job, for free might I add, I tell him I’m unwilling to continue unless there is a definite contract on the end of it.  His response is something along the lines of “I told you before, you have the job if you can get this finished.”  My interpretation of this statement is that I have the job.  He also asks me to requote the job, to cover only the XHTML/CSS work and to give him a delivery date for that work.

So I work for another two or three hours to tighten things up a little more.  This time all this work is done late at night, after I’d completed a bunch of other stuff I needed to get done that day.  I finally wrap up at approximately 2.30am.  I upload the changes to my staging server and email the quote off to him and promptly go to sleep.

I wake in the morning to an email full of complaints about the quote.  So I promptly get on Skype and chat with him.  As the discussion develops, he complains that I’m not communicating effectively with him.  Fair enough I think.  As it turns out, the lynch pin has already been pulled.  What was the final straw?  I’d forgotten to give him a delivery date.  He promptly tells me that he doesn’t feel he should continue using me and that its in his best interests to find someone else to do the work.

So, after making me write three different quotes and asking me to do 10+ hours of work with no compensation, I find out I have no contract on the end of it and no compensation for the work I’ve already done!

This whole experience has taught me one very important lesson: Don’t do a single minute of work until you have an agreement for compensation drawn up.  Even if there is an apparent guarantee of work, don’t do it.  Close the agreement discussions first.