Fun Size Bytes (from @Tj)

Do a Job, Get Paid, Let It Go…

I had lunch today with one of the people I do web “stuff” for.

About 4-5 years ago they contacted me to interview for a part-time/flex-time position working on their website. Not great pay, but a nice little side gig.

I worked my ass off trying to get a proposal ready, which involved downloading their entire site and re-working it for the interview. (Note: I later learned that web professionals have a term for this. They call it “being incredibly stupid.”)

They were absolutely blown away by my presentation, and hired the wife of the guy who just happened to be the chair of the technology committee. Who had roughly no actual skills in this area… for example, at one point she deleted a bunch of files from the server which were apparently the only versions in existence. Backups?! HA! Never heard of ‘em.

About 2 years ago, the director and associate director contacted me directly (not through the committee), and asked me to help them transition their paper newsletter to an electronic newsletter because their budget was slashed. By this point they had hired an outside company to manage their website.

The job originally consisted of putting the newsletter together and creating a PDF which was emailed out to a list of people.

Then it was putting the PDF on the website.

Then it was “Can we put the articles from the newsletter onto the website?”

Eventually the PDF version was discontinued and we posted things to a separate section of the website, which ran under WordPress, because the main site was run under Joomla which was, in my estimation, like using a bazooka to kill a mosquito. It was waaaaaay more complex than what they needed, and even a tech-savvy person like myself found it very confusing.

Then the outside company went out of business, and they hired me to create an entirely new website, which I did, in Wordpress. This was finished roughly a year ago.

Ever since we began, they have had grandiose visions of what they wanted to do with the site. I’ve been trying to build a foundation they can grow on.

Today I had lunch with the associate director who said:

1. She went to a conference and met someone there who really likes Joomla and they use Joomla and we’re thinking of switching back to Joomla.

2. Their budget, cut 50% this year, is going to be cut 50% next year. So they “want to take over more of the day to day stuff” (i.e. what they’ve been paying me to do, which I’ve been doing because WordPress is a little over their heads)

So, to recap:

a) they used an overly complex piece of software that they hated and which confused them

b) they paid me to switch them to an easier system, which has still proven too complex for them

c) they now are “thinking” about moving back to the other system, and then want to keep me on as a (paid but many fewer hours) ‘consultant’.

sigh

This is why you ask to be paid something for your work, even if it’s a nominal amount… because when they decide they want to undo all the work you’ve done for the past two years, you can say to yourself, “Well, at least I got paid.”

I’m quite sure that what they’re going to end up with will be a worse version of what I made for them. They may end up with a “more powerful” system, but it’s going to be more than they need, and they’re going to loathe using it, which means it will get updated less frequently, which will make it less useful.

But if that’s what they want to do…