What the fucking hell IS it with people?! Do they think all services are free? Or do they just not give a fucking shit?
My wife babysits. She’s down to one goddamn customer as of yesterday because the rest have all come up with one fucking excuse after another not to pay their bill. Hell, she only charges $3/hour, I can’t imagine finding anyone cheaper, and yet one of these fuckwads ran up more than $100 before we finally cut her off. NOW she’s bitching that she won’t be able to go to her job interview because we won’t watch her brats. FUCK YOU, lady.
I have a customer that I’ve done $400 worth of work for developing a custom goddamn inventory system. The closest commercial equivalent I can find that does what he wants costs more than that. He’s been hemming and hawing over paying the bill for three months, I’ve seen a little less than $100 of it and now he’s not returning my damn calls. What. The. FUCK? A goddamn business ought to understand that being a deadbeat is fucking unacceptable.
While selling my old car (a Ford Tempo) lately, I had several interested buyers. It finally sold, to the only sane one of the bunch. The rest? Well, I had one who wanted me to transfer the title to him so he could go to a title-loan place and get the money to pay me; another who wanted me to accept, um, goods of questionable legality in exchange; and a lady who gave me a check and was pissed that I didn’t hand over the keys and title right then and there, because I insisted on waiting for the check to clear first. Of course it didn’t, and she’s pissed that I sold it to someone else without giving her ‘another chance’.
The sheer entitlement complex all of these folks have shown boggles the mind. I truly don’t understand it. No, worse: I’m fucking SICK of this shit! Pay your goddamn bills, people! Don’t try to buy shit you can’t afford. You do NOT deserve everything for free. You are NOT a special fucking snowflake. You are NOT a goddamn princess/diva/goddess/whatever the fuck it is these days.
I’ve had this happen to me when I was a teenager. I’d watch two children for a single Mom in the complex, write down the hours when she got home (with her watching) and she’d pay me when she got paid. This worked fine for a number of months, until one day she suddenly moved. She never told us she was moving or anything, and I never saw the $250 she owed me.
It still annoys me that she totally bugged out on us (my brother helped, so I’d split what we earned with him). It was summer, there was lots of things I’d rather be doing but it was a way to have a little spending money from summer break while my regular (winter) job was on hiatus.
There are local collection agencies that will be happy to pursue deadbeats for you, even for debts as little as $100. They are worth their fees, if only to demonstrate to the shitheels that you are serious about settling their debt.
She walks out of the house without getting paid for her babysitting time? While there’s no excuse for stiffing the sitter (ooh, that sounds dirty) there’s also no excuse for the sitter’s leaving without being paid.
I suggest in future that your wife allow a client to miss one payment. The next time she sits for that client, she must be paid for the previous service and the current service before the client leaves the child in her care, otherwise your wife refuses to sit for that session. Watch how quickly they come up with the cash in the face of having to either cancel their plans or find another sitter with no notice.
One of the many duties of one company I worked for was making collection calls. Oh, the agony. I had one guy that swore up and down he wrote the check and that we cashed it. At the time, I was working a night job as well with the company that facilitates the bank’s data transfer and had to manually check the files sometimes. I told him I’d check my records and get back to him tomorrow. Lo and behold, no check. It was the princely sum of…$16 and change. I told him to come in with a $20 and we’ll make change, it got so bad.
Another one was a woman that ran up close to $4000 of debt in a month with us. Calling her was surreal. She’d put down the phone for a while, pick back up and ask, “Oh, you’re still there?” Finally, we had to threaten small claims court, which opened her checkbook, and we got the money in 2 days.
I get behind, but it’s mostly to wait until the end of the interest period before I pay the gas, oil, phone, internet all at one sitting.
When developing custom software systems it is a fairly trivial task to put in a piece of code that will disable the functionality on a certain date unless a special code is entered. You’ll be surprised how fast they can cough up the money when their inventory system is suddenly dead in the water.
We have a deadbeat boarder in our barn. If it wasn’t for the fact that we genuinely like the poor horse (they haven’t come to see him for well over 3 months) and are the ones who take care of him–for a chunk extra on their board, of course), we’d have pitched them out awhile back. We COULD go to court and seize the horse as they’re always late on their bill (and hubby has to go get the $$, they will NOT come up to the barn) but it’s not worth the time and hassle.
He didn’t address his question to a telepath. He put it in the Pit and left it open to all-comers. I am a comer. At least, I used to be when I was younger and in better shape. If you’re dragging over your concerns about health care entitlement to this thread, maybe you should post a copy of your Certificate of Righteous Indignation. Plus, your License to Hijack With Witty Snips would be nice.
Some have expressed that they like it. Some have expressed that they don’t. Most have given no opinion one way or the other. You’ll find a thread in ATMB where this was sort of discussed. I like the font because of its very clear bold tag, which is hardly noticeable in the default Trebuchet. Same thing for the *italic tag * as well. Also, the “I” character is a Roman I with bars at top and bottom. Compare “Ill” (Verdana) and “Ill” (Trebuchet).
She babysits at our house, actually – and what are we supposed to do, tell them they can’t pick up their kids until they pay up? Hell, that’s punishing US, not them.
Yes, it is. It’s also, IMO, unprofessional. Not deliver the final product until they pay? Just fine. Deliver a product that contains a time bomb? Uh, not so much. That’s extortion, in my book. And my side business (the consulting stuff) depends entirely on word-of-mouth. What I don’t need is a pissed-off customer badmouthing me because his critical control system suddenly stopped working, regardless of the cause.
This guy was paying on time during development, and I had no indication he was going to stiff me once he got the final version (or rather, the most recent ‘working’ release). You can be sure I’ll be getting paid before he gets anything in the future (assuming I do any further work for him), but he’s the first business customer who’s pulled this shit. I see it from private customers all the damn time, which is why they pay by the hour up front for my work, but a fucking business? What the hell!
Oh, and Liberal? Chalk me up on the list of people that finds your new posting font distracting and jarring.
I worked for a company once that designed and built a new machine for General Motors. It was a machine to finish aluminum heads and had some new concepts. The owner ran all the labor and components through a new company name. He had everything delivered to a address around the corner that he owned. I thought it was to keep everything separate for tracking labor and component costs. After delivery he declared bankruptcy on that company and never paid the bills. he essentially let others pay for his machine and skated.
I had my business destroyed by two such deadbeat clients a few years back. One was a rather large insurance company and I had to sue them in order to collect $80k of the $250k they owed me. The other was a smaller business that signed the contracts and accepted services with no apparent intent of paying me with real checks. For that one, I hold a court award of $28k but no cash. I guess I should take some satisfaction from knowing that she went to prison for wire fraud. However, I almost lost my house and screwed up my credit pretty well trying (unsuccessfully) to save my company from these back-to-back disasters.
jumped right out at me. I made more than that babysitting 15 years ago as a young teenager. As an adult with babysitting experience, why is she charging anything less than minimum wage?
Ouch. Dude, I feel for you. Fortunately for me it’s not something I depend on, so I’m not hurt much when someone doesn’t pay up. I’m out my time, of course, but that’s about it.
Honestly, stories like yours are why I don’t want to return to consulting as a career. I liked it when I did it full-time, but I was employed by a consulting firm and preferred it that way – riding out the highs and lows is much easier when you aren’t the one solely responsible for it all. I prefer salaried employment, even though it means I have to do things I don’t like.
I just wish I could use these people for something, personally. I’m thinking fertilizer for my garden, myself. Or crash dummies for collision tests. Perhaps the foreign body used in testing jet engines? Something appropriate, at any rate.
