Never Personal / BWE

In which our Hero expresses some of the frustration that comes with the business of being in business

My contract with my primary client is for consulting services for the term of one year. It sounds good, but at any time, the client can always call done with just 30 days or notice. And by default, 30 days from the end of the contract, it’s automatic notice, and the job hunt begins. It’s a nice, and simple system with clear expectations for everybody. Which is why it never works that way.

It’s hard to get a new client in the first place, or at least it’s harder than keeping the current client (assuming you want to in the first place). Even if circumstances take you elsewhere, the industry is absurdly smaller than it ever seems and chances are you’ll encounter that company or that manager again. So you make allowances as gestures of courtesy. You offer the current client the option keep you before you ever look elsewhere. And you give them time to make up their mind when they’re waffling.

Usually, they go right to the wire. It’s stressful, but you grit your teeth because they pay their bills without too much fuss, and you have the flexibility if you need to, hypothetically, collect your mother from Texas. Once, they were a few days late, and that was a very tense few days.

I think I’d take a slightly harder line if it was a direct relationship, but we have an agent in between us and them. I won’t put the screws to my agent because he’s *why* I get paid on time, and he eats the gap between the contract and reality. But I’ll get into that. In the short term, I don’t want punitive clauses for him because it’s not his fault and he’s a contractor here just like I am, screwed in the same way.

But right now, we’re inside the expiry window. Right now I have planned time off at the end of the year, and the professional thing to do is to send out an email notifying the client that at this time, I’m scheduled to vanish in 3 weeks and if they want me to brain-dump my years of accumulated knowledge into anybody, they’d better let me know now. It has the upside of reinforcing the time pressure for the direct managers I work with. Which will not help me a bit.

The issue is actually at the top, and it’s a political mess in the worse senses of the word. They’ve realized, I think, that I and a few of my fellow contractors are core members of this new project but don’t have direct skills in the software. Granted, we’ve stopped them from making a number of stupid decisions, but the lesson they seem to have drawn is that they’d feel less stupid if we weren’t working on their project. So right now I’m *not* on the freight-train project that’s pretty much run down everything else.

What remains is the chance to pick up the slack, if they decide they want to do that, and step in for the employees who are now on the train. It’s much more meaningless work than I’m doing now (as hard as that is to believe) and if they’re paying attention, they’ll notice that I’m a very *expensive* way to back-fill.

But most of all, it’s just a political bun-fight because they’ve more or less agreed to the cost of the lot of us, but they’re haggling over the pennies. “Yes, we’re spending 10 dollars, but splitting it 5 and 5 is just wrong.” And they gave their word that things would be resolved last Monday. And then last Friday. And now this Monday.

Their word. I was amused at how frustrated my agent has been about how little their word is worth. The fact is that up and down this organization, their word is worth nothing. There is no accountability, there is no responsibility. They have a contract that says they have to pay their suppliers in 30 days, but that means the earliest you might see money is 45. This coming year, they’re extending it to 60 days which means reality will be closer to 90. It’s in the contract, but they don’t care. They’ll just say “Fine, here’s your money, we’re going to hire someone else more spineless”

My agent said, “Joe is okay, but the rest of them, you can’t trust at all.” I just fought the urge to laugh. You want okay? I sold a one-month extension to our project at the time for around $50k. Joe signed it. We did the work. Joe signed acceptance for it. A few months passed.

Then Joe called my mentor/manager to ask what the heck happened and why we’d over-billed by 50k. And we eventually tracked it down to this one-month thing. That he’d blessed at the time. But now claimed he couldn’t afford. And then he asked us to cancel the contract. It’s been years and this still upsets me. We did the work in good faith. He approved it, personally. And because our employer wanted to protect the relationship, admittedly worth far more, they said “give the money back. No hard feelings.”

None for the client, anyway. I’m firmly convinced that undoing the $50k from the balance sheet was what took me off the promotion list that year. And reflecting on it this morning, I suddenly realized that the delay ended up costing me around $50k. Well, okay, probably closer to $40k, but it was years of pay I didn’t get because his word given wasn’t worth anything.

People say “It’s not personal” when they do questionable things in business. I’d tell you that Joe’s personal word is gold, but professionally, I will never be able to say the same thing. And in the end, what’s the difference? Your word is your word. Business has policies and approvals and you can get overridden. But then you say that you can’t say. “I think we’re good, subject to the business.”

Maybe we’re supposed to assume that. Maybe that’s my mistake, but having made it I have no trust for any of them anymore. I can still work with them, because my expectations are low all around. I can work with them, but I’m angry.

Because it’s personal. I’m a person. Each one of them is a person. Consideration is not so hard as all that. I could start looking, but I think the right thing is to offer my client continuity and patience. It’d be nice if they remembered (or cared) that it’s December, and it’s a hard month to get a job. The last two weeks are a write off for hiring, for interviews. But still they drag their feet.

I let them.