Ok, this is just a minor bitch of mine, but one of my 2 careers is as a professional photographer. Clients seem to think that since I’m just taking pictures they can hold out on paying me until my attorney sends them a ‘pay up or else’ letter. What the fuck? Photography, especially architecture photography, is a skill which takes years of training and practice, not to mention seriously expensive equipment. why is it that these dumb shits can’t pay up when the bill comes due? I mean, I can understand when its a band or someone who doesn’t have a lot of expendable cash. I’ll work with them. Also, they tend to come at me with cash in hand. The richer a client is though, the longer it takes them to pay. meh, I feel a little better ranting some, and fuck, it isn’t like my attorney charges me anything more than family portraits once a year and portraits of his firms partners once a year.
Some rich people get (or stay) rich simply by working hard and/or having good ideas. Other rich people, though, get (or stay) rich partly by never paying for anything that they don’t absolutely have to.
Not paying your bill until legal action is threatened doesn’t cost them anything, and there’s always the chance that you may give up or go under before they actually have to fork out the cash. Win!
Add a reasonably good sized penalty for having to go to collection onto the charge. It’s still annoying to have to do it, but that softens the sting somewhat.
Oh man can I cosign this please?!
One of my longest-standing clients (web design, editing, writing, PR, you name it I’ve done it for them as an independent contractor) has suddenly decided not to pay me for work I’ve performed over a three-month period – work that was delivered exactly as the client wanted it – because s/he’s pissed off by one error I made on a totally different project, which was not part of the earlier invoice.
I understand withholding payment for work one isn’t pleased with (although really, that’s not how we’ve dealt with the issue in the rare other times the client’s been semi-displeased with anything). But not paying for projects that have been absolutely satisfactorally delivered and are currently in-use on their website and being used in products currently on sale?
No. That’s bullshit.
Ah, the joys of freelancing…
chances are this client is now in a cash crunch and is panicking. probably figures you’ll be “more forgiving.”
Y’know, that’s actually quite possible. Although in the past we’ve been able to split payments up when cash-on-hand was an issue.
Another client died last year. I wasn’t told and so I blithely kept billing her for past work due and webhosting services (and eating the cost myself) for months, trying to get in touch with her to understand what the story was, until finally someone from the family contacted me. They said they’d pay me for the balance that she’d left, plus the months of hosting for her sites. Not surprisingly, that didn’t happen and that was the end of that. Her husband went back to Russia and it’s not an amount worth making a fuss over (even if I thought I could collect… I’m not sure how debts work when someone dies, at least regarding business expenses).
Eventually, though I hated to do it, I had to shut the sites down. I found it very depressing; not just because, y’know, the client was dead, and not because I was out the money for various stuff including the hosting. But because these sites meant a lot to my late client, an author who wrote about her native Russian folk stories and old fashioned remedies. I felt awful shutting 'em down, but just couldn’t justify them, financially speaking. I might put up a mirror site just as a sort of memorial. I don’t know why, if the family didn’t care why should I? Yet I do.
Well, because I suspect that in your heart, the loss of some of our rarer information about history or culture is akin to burning a book, a process that only the most loathsome misanthropes engage in.
I can see that. shrug
You know, it’s said that once it’s on teh interwebs, it’s there forever. Is that literally true in some way, or should we be lobbying the Library of Congress to archive those sites that have useful information that shouldn’t be lost to the march of progress?
I mean, if we need to do that, I vote that our first candidate should be Time Cube guy.
I keed.
deposit gets you low res proofs, final pics when payment recieved.
I had a customer about 8 months ago now. We did $300 worth of work on one of their machines, 3 weeks later, something else blows up and they decide to order another machine. Where we normally take a 50% deposit, they whined and cried, and I knew the lady from high school, I didnt take a deposit. Of the $900 price of that machine, we have recieved exactly $200 and a bunch of empty promises of, will have a check monday, or friday…
I have remote access to the machine, and they tend to leave it on at night…I am sooooo tempted sometimes to sabotage it and say I will fix it in exchange for another payment.
pikey pete, why not deliver the pictures when paid?
Go for it.
You’re right that I do hate losing info. I have most of her stuff in archived and zipped databases (I didn’t just turn off the sites, I downloaded and saved the info first to make sure I had it just in case the clients’ family ever wanted it. In my last email I offered a flash drive with the info if it meant something to them. I wouldn’t have charged them for it either – to me it belongs to them.)
As far as archived web stuff in general goes, there’s the Internet Archive, where you can pull up many, many dead sites–and not just homepages but a surprising number of internal pages are indexed there, too. For example, here’s one of my late client’s blogs, as it looked back in 2008.
Anyway, back to the OP, I must echo drachillix and Sitnam – why not hold back the pictures until payment is made? I know that doesn’t help you now, but in future if that clause is put into your contract/work agreement, it might save you some agita.
So much photography/web/design work is needed yesterday, and it’s awkward to hold back delivering the work until you’re paid. If you care about your client, you want them to get the (AWESOME) stuff you’re doing as soon as you can get it to them.
But it means you’re the perfect sucker for a machiavellian financial mind
(which is often a whole different person/dept from who you’re dealing with).
I had an accountant confide to me that his budget is based on stretching out paying all freelancers at least 60 days late. Even the ones that were promised prompt payment due to the emergency deadlines of a project.
He’d been a friend (up until that conversation), but I told him: “Y’know that clause in small print at the bottom of my invoices? The one that says “10% added weekly after 30 days”? Well, I’ve never enforced that, but I am starting today.”
It can’t find The Worst of the Web, dang it.
Isn’t that still active at http://www.worstoftheweb.com? Or is this a whoosh?
Man, I’m glad to know our small Web firm is not the only one getting shafted. And it’s not like we’re getting shafted by our $24.95/mo hosting clients (we just fucking shut them off and then they pay attention)…no, we’re getting shafted by millions-of-dollars-a-year companies with fucking NET 60 policies.
Net 60 THEN after 90 days we have to beg them to pleeeease send us the $400 we invoiced them for 90 days ago. It sucks so bad. Of course we’ll keep working for them forever and of course we’ll eventually get the money they owe us but it’s just awful doing work in January and waiting to get paid in July.
The interest for late payments thing is always a nice idea but in reality it’s just an extra headache for our very tiny accounting department (which is me, on Mondays.) We’re about to start taking the idea more seriously now, tho.
There’s a line in an episode of The Simpsons, spoken by Bill Gates*, where he says “I didn’t get rich by writing a lot of cheques**!”
I believe that to be true for many wealthy individuals. They swan around, somehow thinking they’re so important they deserve everything for free.
*Not the real Bill Gates, he would never actually say or do that in real life.
**Spelled a different way.
-
Download a complete mirror image of the machine’s content.
-
Change the root password.
-
Wipe all content from the machine.
-
Reset it so when booted it displays this message: “I will refund your $200 payment when you deliver this machine physically back to me, or restore your content and reset passwords to your specifications on receipt of the outstanding $700, plus interest. In consideration of the $200 earnest payment, I have allowed you use of my computer on which this is displayed in expectation you will complete the purchase by paying the remaining $700 agreed on. Since you have been a good client in the past, I regret having had to take this step to secure my interest. The choice on how to resolve this is yours.”
-
Await the outraged phone call from them.
Those guys took the name. It was written by a guy namedMirsky and was the first item I read regularly on the web. A long time ago, web-wise. 
Businesses are constantly paying each other as late as possible for everything. It wouldn’t surprise me if they try to push it even further with individuals or contract work; they push it with each other.
Oh gosh. I vaguely, vaguely, remember reading some newsgroup (maybe alt.tv.simpsons?) where there would be people spamming the name Mirsky and his website around. Could this be the same guy?
Anyway, here’s the archive of hsi site as it was in 1996. Most of the links work although the images don’t.
Re: drachillix’s method of sabotage, I’ve considered that as well, although not as drastically. Since the stuff that I created for my recalcitrant client is still owned by me, legally speaking, I was planning on going in, grabbing the images, and substituting a version of the image with a watermark “Owned by ___” (my company name). Unfortunately the client changed the passwords to the site and I no longer have access. I should’ve thought of this sooner.