alexpgp | Dealing with money like it matters...

During our morning coffee, Mike brought up a deal that he had become involved with, involving a customer that wanted some pretty expensive flooring to be shipped to Sweden (talk about sending coals to Newcastle!).

The more he described the deal, the "itchier" I got, until finally I couldn't take it any more and Googled some of the salient points of the transaction, which revealed that the whole thing is... a scam.

In other news, I just sent an email response to a client who now says work originally assigned for noon Friday is due tomorrow morning (at the end client's insistence).

Heck, about half of today is gone, y'know?

So, basically, I withdrew from the assignment. Part of my email reads:

The deadline and range of materials to be handled (30 MB of reference documents, a 12K word source file, a file with "pretranslated segments," a second file with more translated segments) will not allow me, in my opinion, to provide a quality product in the time available.

Seeing as how I've been in a dry spell the past couple of weeks, the conventional wisdom would say "take any and all work," and I did actually make a concession in this job with regard to the percentage of "pretranslated" segments therein (I try to keep them to no more than 10% of the job).

However, if there's one thing chess has taught me, it has been to carefully consider the unconventional, which in this case translates into potentially losing a job if I feel uncomfortable doing it, no matter how much my wallet doth protest.

The client has called (which I sort of expected). Back to work.

Cheers...

UPDATE (10:41 am): The job has been canceled. In the end, I think this is for the best.