who’s to blame?

So I’m in a position that is really frustrating – I designed a nice website for this guy a few months ago  and it very quickly ballooned out of the ballpark of what we had agreed on in terms of work for price.  He kept alluding to more work after the site was up and there is something to be said for making an investment in a client at a base price and then normalizing your price for the work that follows.  Okay.  It was a fun site to do.  He wanted it done quickly, I worked hard on it, I accomodated his changes and his desires and his schedule – obviously to a fault.  He mediated some graphics work for me with a client of his.  The agreement was for something very simple and I agreed to a project price.  Very quickly the job changed and he said that I should keep track of my hours, that his client was happy to pay me for the extra work and it would not be a problem.  At this point I made what turns out to be a grave error of not pushing through to knowing what the hourly rate they were thinking was and believing that it would be okay.  I’m not so great about keeping track of my hours, so I low-balled and also low-balled the hourly rate that I wanted.  They claimed to be shocked by both.  They want to pay me a ridiculously small amount of money for the work that I did and they basically are accusing me of padding my hours when in fact I did just the opposite.  Then why do I feel that I’m the one doing something wrong and that I need to accomodate to them?

Update: I really don’t feel like writing about the situation.  3 weeks later I still don’t have my money.  I agreed to their low price just to get the whole situation over with.  They said they would pay – doing an exchange of money for disc.  Then one of the guys calls me up and says that he wants me to mail him the disc with an invoice and he’ll send me a check.  Does he think I’m a complete idiot.  When I said I wouldn’t do that, he said he was shocked.  I said that I was shocked that they keep changing their story and are jerking me around.  He said that if I don’t mail him the disc, he won’t pay me.  What kind of nonesense is that?  Now I have to figure out what to do.  Do I take them to labor court, do I go to a beis din, do I wait until the other guy comes back from out of the country to see if he will be more reasonable than this other guy.  We are not talking about a huge amount of money to them – a couple of hundred dollars, which would make a huge difference to me at this point since Joe and I are starting to share cans of tuna fish since our cash is in such short supply.  What a crappy situation.  I feel like I stood up for myself and it just pissed them off and made them more determined to step all over me.  The thing is, this guy has been stealing people’s posters and having the copyright erased and is re-printing them to sell.  Maybe I’ll just contact some of those companies and see if they are interested in pursuing copyright theft.  Hmmm

update #2:

The saga continues.  The client now says that the only way that he will pay me is if I go to his office outside of Tel Aviv with the discs.  The fact that he has called me a snake, says he is disgusted by me, yells at me on the phone, supposedly yells at the middleman everytime my name comes up does not make me that inclined to do this.  He says he won’t take them any other way – so it seems pretty clear that it’s not about needing to check the discs to see if the work is on them (especially since now supposedly they are changing the project and now using the work anyways) – I think it’s just about him wanting to have a face to face confrontation.  Not only am I not interested in that, I don’t trust the middleman to de-escalate the situation if it gets out of hand and I don’t want to take a day off of my other work and life to go and be in this man’s space.  He says it’s the only way because he doesn’t trust me.  I sent him an e-mail saying that I won’t come to his office, but I will mail him the discs and trust that he will pay me.  My only other option seems to be small claims court.  Not that appealing.  This is really frustrating.