opinios

#$@% me!!

This may be old, I'm not sure. I'm also not sure whether it is a joke or not, but it had me laughing for ages regardless - especially the diagrams of the product in action...

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Link: FuckU-FuckMe

Playing Hardball

The honeymoon has ended and someone ended up offering me full-time employment, starting in a couple of weeks, so the days of playing house husband are now short-lived.

Not that I have been sitting on my hands all this time while my wife brings home the bacon.

In between doing the laundry and the dishes I have taken on a bit of freelance web design work. Despite promising myself that I wasn't going to do it (largely due to some excellent articles I had read about someone in a similar situation), I did in fact undercharge my first client massively in order to win the contract. The client was a friend of a friend and I made him an offer that he couldn't refuse, promising the world. And then I went to work.

Unfortunately it ended up being a can of worms. There was a whole stack of business functionality that he just assumed would be taken into account, and that I assumed I wouldn't need to include because he hadn't mentioned it.

Never assume anything.

Part way into the contract it came out that there was a large amount of extra work that would be required. If it had been a minimal amount I would have been happy to wear it. I was happy to prostitute myself for a couple of weeks because I could foresee how it would be a good portfolio-builder, and this project has already led to me winning a couple of other sites through word of mouth without it even being finished yet.

But when it became obvious that a large portion of extra customisation requiring an additional three weeks of full-time effort was necessary, I submitted an addendum to the contract for my client to peruse.

And it shocked them a bit.

Thus we reached the awkward impasse where I felt like I had already compromised from the outset and wasn't prepared to continue at sub-McDonalds rates for another month, and he felt like he was being taken advantage of and was on the verge of becoming resentful. Not an ideal situation when the relationship is that of not-quite-but-kind-of mates via a mutual friend.

Anyway, we negotiated for an hour or so over the table in a coffee shop, talked about where the gap in understanding lay, and how we might be able to get over it. I had to concede some functionality that I normally would have charged for, and they agreed to a discounted version of the addendum.

A reasonable outcome I think. And probably inevitable due to the fact that it is my first client. But not much fun.

I guess the question is: at what point do you say, "Hang on, I can't give you that for free as well". It's all relative because if you start out cheap then your client won't want to climb much higher. But if you give a more reasonable estimate up front it is likely to scare them off if you don't have a reputation behind you to justify it.

I don't think I would have gone about this job any differently apart from being more demanding up front about the requirements. The initial criteria was to mimic the functionality of the existing site, not add additional stuff to it, and if the existing site had actually worked rather than been a half-arsed attempt at being an eCommerce site that was really just an unfinished page which couldn't actually handle any transactions at all, let alone the complex shipping or tax rules involved in selling to the international community, then there wouldn't have been any ambiguity.

But you can't turn around to your client and say "You're wrong, look read the contract that you signed" or they'll tell you to pack up and leave. You have to diplomatically break it down into understandable chunks, highlight them and gently refer them back to the original contract where they weren't listed. Without getting them upset.

The other interesting thing which is probably more a result of me using an open source package is that while I am purely charging based on the perceived time it will take for me to implement something, customers don't want to pay according to the same scale. The fact that initally this client got a whole heap of functionality included in the initial quote (that came as part of the package) mean that they were therefore confused about why a customised add-on should cost about the same amount again. They already got so much for so little, and expect everything else to come a price relative to that perceived value.

I guess this is a danger when installing open source technology, you can take advantage of the fact that you are standing on the shoulders of the people who developed the original system, but you need to be able to factor in the price of customisation when giving your quote.

Anyway it's all a learning experience and I think I handled myself reasonably well after this morning's meeting. I got the all important signature for the next phase and the first portion of the payment, even if I did have to play hardball a little bit.

Now I have to go make it work.

Nine Blind Mice

Some of you may remember the rat story from our apartment in Tokyo.

With that experience fresh in our mind, you can imagine our delight when we first moved into our Melbourne apartment and kept hearing strange scratching sounds coming from inside the kitchen wall. As much as we didn't want a repeat of the Tokyo rat, there was no way that we were going to share our apartment with rodents again. So while my wife was out earning money to pay the rent, as the unemployed house-husband it was my number one priority to get rid of the little bastards.

The range of mousetrap options in Australia certainly exceeds the Japanese market. When I was living in Preston with my cousin a few years ago we were broke and opted for the cheapest traps available - your standard-fare metal-spring on wood option. They worked, but they sprayed blood and brains on the carpet and wall to get the job done (note to self: when setting mouse traps, make sure you remember exactly where you have put them and check them regularly, to avoid the nasty surprise of discovering a smelly decomposing corpse under your bed two weeks later).

So this time I opted for the "Safe 'n' Swift" washable reusable fail-proof plastic mega super trap just because its distinguishing feature according to the packaging was "no mess". The instructions also recommended using peanut butter on the traps, rather than the universally accepted cheese, and so armed with these super traps and some Kraft Super Crunchy, I lay the bait and lay in wait.

As it turns out, we had a whole family of mice living in our kitchen. And they didn't go exploring for food in numbers - they would send out a brave explorer one at a time. "Strength in numbers" would have been my approach personally, but I guess this little clan sat around in my kitchen playing "Scissors, Paper, Rock" and then sent the unlucky loser of their little mouse game out to forage for the week's supplies solo.

So, one by one, each member of the family fell victim to my traps. I set four of them, and each morning over the course of a couple of weeks I would wake up and find one or two dead mice, with surprised looks on their faces and their mouth stuffed with peanut butter. After the ninth, there were no more.

Now, if only I could work out how to get rid of all the damn ants in the bathroom...

Balancing Things Out

Ok, here's a story to provide a bit of balance for any of our dear American readers who I might have offended with my previous post.

I've blogged before about our neighbours when we were living in Tokyo. By day they would smile and be friendly, but in the evening (usually if they were hitting the sake) they would get extremely loud and abusive. Those thin wooden walls aren't terribly sound-proof, and we were subjected to the more than a few domestic screaming matches.

Well, yesterday in our Melbourne apartment I was starting to wonder whether our volatile couple had been reincarnated as a couple of Aussie thugs living upstairs. It was around 3pm that a string of loud abuse carried down the stairs and through our walls. I was getting a bit worried, because this time it was in English and I could actually understand what they were saying.

And it wasn't pretty.

Oh my god you are a fucking joke! You are pathetic! Pathetic!!You useless prick! Get the fuck out of here!

The door slammed and I pricked my ears for a sign that the shouting might deteriorate into something worse. Feeling somewhat voyeuristic, I glued my eye to the security hole of our front door for a glimpse of the action. It was then that two tall men in colourful scarves hurried angrily past my door and headed outside, throwing their hands up in disgust. I only managed to catch one word from them, but it was enough to clear everything up.

"Bloody umpires!"

Yes, that's right. The two had been watching a game of Aussie Rules football on television. Didn't I feel stupid. I'd forgotten just how sports-obsessed this city is.

You Know I Love Y'all...

Dunstan's tales of American ignorance brought back a few recollections of my time in the States that I hadn't thought about for a while.

When I was on a training course for work in Tampa, Florida, I got chatting to a blond beach bunny and her boyfriend on the beach, and the conversation went a little somethin' like this:

Blond Beach Bunny: Oh, are you from Australia?
Me: That's right.
BBB: So do you, like, ride kangaroos down the street and stuff?
Me: Er, yes, that's right. I rode one to school pretty much every day.
BBB: Wow! So are they, like, hopping down the main road and stuff?
Me: Yeah, you can just jump on. We don't need public transport, we have kangaroos.
BBB: That is sooooo cool!

And later that same week...

Taxi Driver: Where you from?
Me: Australia.
TD: Oh, you speak pretty good English!
Me: Yeah, well, thankyou.
TD: So what's the climate like over there?
Me: Oh, well we're quite close to Antarctica, so it's pretty cold. Lots of snow, ice storms and quite mountainous terrain.
TD: Oh, I see. I heard most people live on the coast, is that right?
Me: The coast? Nah, we all live inland. It's much too dangerous living on the coast. You know, the tidal waves.
TD: (looking confused): Oh...

I didn't even need to warn them about the drop bears. They just fed me material and I went with it.

Here's something scary to think about: if this is a random stranger's general knowledge of Australia, just how much do they actually know about Iraq???

From Mount Gambier To Athens

A huge congratulations to my cousin Carmel for her selection in the Hockeyroos (the Australian Women's Hockey Team) to defend their title at the Athens Olympics in August!! She came so close to playing in Sydney and narrowly missed out at the last minute, so we are all very proud and excited for her.

The road has been long and arduous and she has had to give up a lot to get there, but she is playing at the peak of her performance and so the honour of representing her country is well deserved.

Way to go Carmel! Lap up the atmosphere and enjoy the experience - we will be shouting our support so loudly while watching your games on TV in Melbourne that you just might be able to hear us all the way over there in Greece...