The Project
Thu Sep 22, 2011 5:51:29 pm

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My client called me yesterday. I saw that he called and didn't answer, because I hate talking on the phone. He left a voicemail message asking to call him back. He said it was important, but he didn't say what it was about. A few minutes later, he sent me an email asking to call him. It seemed unavoidable, so I called him.

He reminded me about the October 1 deadline and yelled at me for not having done anything the past week. I reminded him that work on the backend of the site does not create anything visible. He ignored that and yelled again. I explained to him that I had been working on the FedEx label. He wants the site to automatically generate one. He told me that he spoke to a FedEx technician already and they told him that it is easy. He referred to my explanation as a "story" and implied that it was a lie.

The FedEx label system is easy, but only if you are willing to have a completely blank form that the customer has to fill out. Since the site requires registration before the customer gets to the point where they can request a label, it would make sense to automatically fill out the sender's information. It is also a very important requirement to have a reference number automatically generated, because we use this to correlate what we receive with our records. Getting this to happen requires editing the code that FedEx gave me. Their code is a 138,531 character text file on ONE LINE. My usual text editor crashed when opening it. 10 other text editors also crashed. I only found one that could open that file. I had to edit that, which took several days just to reformat into something readable.

There was so much wrongness in my client's accusation that I was too stunned to respond. I had been working for the past 11 days without a break and he was accusing me of procrastinating. His goal was probably to try to force me to hurry, but that is wrong in many ways. Programming requires tremendous concentration. One missing punctuation mark or misspelling can cause it to malfunction. Also, he implied that he might replace me with someone else. It takes away the incentive to rush when there is legitimate reason to suspect that he might not even pay the remainder of what he owes. He sent another check two weeks ago, so he has now paid half of the original estimated cost. I could take him to court if he doesn't pay for additional work that I have done since then, but that's not a very motivating thought.

I did a significant amount of visible work on the site after the call, but it wasn't because of the call. It was because the FedEx label system was the last complex backend task. Everything else left is simple. Each of the remaining changes only takes a few minutes. He did not send me any messages today. He usually comments on changes that I make. I'm not sure what that means.