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.

Arnona

You’ve got to wonder about a system that can reduce a grown man to tears.  Arnona, ah a word that strikes fear into new olim…to say nothing, I’m sure about veteran Israelis.  Arnona is the Hebrew word for property tax.  In a bizarre reversal from everything we understand, property taxes in Israel are the responsibility of the tenant, not the owner of the property.  To make it more confusing is the elusive ‘discount’ on arnona that is alluded to be available to those in more difficult financial circumstances.  Basically most of the people I know here would put themselves in that category!  

The whole arnona issue has increased our stress level astronomically – in fact it brought my 200 some odd pound 6′ tall husband to tears today.  There is an archaic system here – level upon level of bureacracy, form upon form to fill out, office upon office to visit…and even though they say they want immigrants to come, they make almost no attempt to ease the entry.  Very few people in the municipal office speak English, none of the forms are in English, and the person at the entrance to the discount area will only let you in if they feel that you have all of the necessary paperwork but will not tell you what that might be.  Every time we’ve gone, it’s been a different set of papers that we are missing.  Thankfully at one point Joe said that he would take care of the issue.  Whew!  He seemed clear, strong, and willing to sit solidly at the desk until the issue was resolved.  Well, maybe he would have if they had let him in so he could sit at one of those desks in a timely manner so we could have opened a file so we could have been considered for the discount.  We started the procedure in May of last year and last week (one year and one month after we first stepped foot in their offices) we got a letter that said that although we now have all of the requisite paperwork (oh no, wait, there’s one more piece of paper we’re missing) since we didn’t get all the paperwork in before January we have been disqualified.

Thank you, municipality of Jerusalem for once again making us wonder what the frig we were thinking to give up everything we knew to throw our lot in with this country.