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Tell me what I want to hear...
Dec. 7th, 2011 08:45 pmA relatively new client, who has touched base with me a few times since our first encounter (with cryptic emails asking what my "capacity" was, tempting me to provide an answer along the lines of "120 pF," but I digress), did its best to convince me to accept work at a rate significantly below what I usually charge.
The incentive, for me, was that the end client was offering a huge amount of work over a short time period, with the promise of lots more work like that to come. To sweeten the pot, the agency offered to pay my invoice within 3 days of receipt (at least, for this first slug of work).
The situation brought to mind a series of phone calls I got about a half dozen years ago from companies preparing to bid on a contract for the comprehensive translation of basically a semi-trailer load of technical design documents that were, subject-wise, right up my alley.
The incentive for that job included going in-house (i.e., giving up all other clients), relocating across about five states (at my own expense), working for remuneration that was about 60% of what I was used to charging for the same level of effort, and then, once the job was finished, to be out of a job. Needless to say, I was not exactly enthusiastic about joining the team.
Before giving my final answer to the current inquiry, I asked to take a look at the documents, and they clinched my decision to say "no." The source files were PDFs made up of poorly photocopied images that were marginally legible and almost certainly could not be OCRed. And so I made my decision and declined the work. When asked if I would provide a reason why, I hesitated, but in the end sent the following note:
Apropos of source document quality, I can say this: Since 1994, of all documents of substandard quality that have landed in one form or another on my desk or computer screen, agencies have promised to "do what they can" to find a better copy pretty much about 100% of the time. Try as I might, I cannot recall any instance where a better copy was actually procured, at least not by an agency.
In other agency news, a small job I did for a New York agency in October on a net-10-days basis has not been paid, and there has been no response to a reminder email sent yesterday morning. Unfortunately, the Payment Practices web site has a response logged about the agency, and it suggests a certain amount of time and effort may be required to get the invoice paid. Looking at the positive side, at least the invoice in question is for a small job.
Cheers...
The incentive, for me, was that the end client was offering a huge amount of work over a short time period, with the promise of lots more work like that to come. To sweeten the pot, the agency offered to pay my invoice within 3 days of receipt (at least, for this first slug of work).
The situation brought to mind a series of phone calls I got about a half dozen years ago from companies preparing to bid on a contract for the comprehensive translation of basically a semi-trailer load of technical design documents that were, subject-wise, right up my alley.
The incentive for that job included going in-house (i.e., giving up all other clients), relocating across about five states (at my own expense), working for remuneration that was about 60% of what I was used to charging for the same level of effort, and then, once the job was finished, to be out of a job. Needless to say, I was not exactly enthusiastic about joining the team.
Before giving my final answer to the current inquiry, I asked to take a look at the documents, and they clinched my decision to say "no." The source files were PDFs made up of poorly photocopied images that were marginally legible and almost certainly could not be OCRed. And so I made my decision and declined the work. When asked if I would provide a reason why, I hesitated, but in the end sent the following note:
The bottom line is this: My work flow is fairly steady, so taking on work at less than my going rate involves a risk of having to turn down work at my standard rate. To mitigate that risk, I can only justify accepting lower-paying assignments when they come with a longer deadline, so that the work can be done "around" higher paying jobs.I suppose, if I were trying to break into this racket, I might have taken this job, warts and all, but it also occurs to me that a number of talented people don't survive in this racket precisely because they take such jobs, warts and all. There's probably a well-formed essay in all of this, but the drumming of the rain outside is distracting me, and I have 9,000 words of work on my plate right now (at my usual rate), so I better get some of it done.
For this particular job, however, not only is the deadline such as to require full-time effort, but the source files are of poor quality, hard to read, not searchable, etc. (In fact, the large file is about 60% unreadable.)
Taken as a whole, then, the promise of "more of this kind of work" loses quite a bit of any allure it may have had to begin with.
Apropos of source document quality, I can say this: Since 1994, of all documents of substandard quality that have landed in one form or another on my desk or computer screen, agencies have promised to "do what they can" to find a better copy pretty much about 100% of the time. Try as I might, I cannot recall any instance where a better copy was actually procured, at least not by an agency.
In other agency news, a small job I did for a New York agency in October on a net-10-days basis has not been paid, and there has been no response to a reminder email sent yesterday morning. Unfortunately, the Payment Practices web site has a response logged about the agency, and it suggests a certain amount of time and effort may be required to get the invoice paid. Looking at the positive side, at least the invoice in question is for a small job.
Cheers...
