Once again, another rude immature acting graphic web designer.

I’m not sure if this is a male or a female, but when they went to fill out our online application, instead of following the instructions & putting their answers in the comment field, they sent them in an e-mail to me which is very very strange. They also didn’t give us their phone number, so they are obviously hiding something.

Since only one other person out of hundreds has ever e-mailed the answers instead of putting them in the application, I knew this Jesse person wasn’t going to work out because there would be too many mistakes they would make that we would be stressed over.

So I told them that if they aren’t understanding me already, then we won’t be able to continue.

LOL, that is when this Jesse character had to try & prove to me that THEY don’t want to work for us even though I had just stated that. Once again, someone who tries to blame others for their actions instead of taking responsibility.

“Judging your attitude, you’re not an employer I would want anyway. I
am well qualified for this position, but it is a mutual agreement –
i’ll take my services elsewhere.”

Noooo, they are NOT qualified for this position because they can’t even follow simple instructions.

Independent contractors have to learn that working at a company is MORE than just their skillset, it’s a combination of communication skills, attitude, maturity, desire to learn, grow & help the company, etc.

Thank god Jesse Johnston’s attitude became apparent quickly so we don’t have to waste anymore time on them.

http://www.softobiz.com/

Also Arjun - arjun.sharma@softobiz.com

And Garv is supposedly their manager.

So here is what happened (there always seems to be problems working with East Indians. One day I’ll learn my lesson.)…

Gagan applied to one of our hiring ads as a graphic web designer back in May of 2008.

There were problems with him signing our NDA. He was freaking out because they are a company & NOT just one person. This is why I say NEVER deal with companies, I have only ever experienced tons of issues in communication, & what I’ve found out, is that they lie saying only one person is dealing with you when really they switch back & forth so you never know who you are talking to, who’s doing the work, etc.

I’ve had that happen with East Indians, Pakistanis & Filipinos.

Anyway, Gagan proceeded to design a header for us & in the end it didn’t look anything like the portfolio I had seen. I mean who in their right mind uses fuchsia to colour a business site that isn’t in the fashion or jewelry industry??? And once again, miscommunication re: him making it seem like he’d do a logo for the header, then he doesn’t.

Here are my notes on what happened…

“First his 2 mockups weren’t good at all. They were just coloured headers with no image, nothing, just the name of the URL.

Then he asked me if I wanted a logo & I said sure, but when he quoted me, he never said that the price was without a logo, nor did he follow up to discuss how much more it would be, that he wasn’t doing it with a logo for the price he quoted me, etc.

Then he redid the plain header & while I thought the image was ok, the image & the rest of the header didn’t flow (the line). He fixed it, but I still wasn’t convinced, so I sent it to Andy.

——————————–

After I spoke to his manager Garv who was very rude for sticking up for Gagan, we parted ways & I received no design. At that point I had no hard feelings against Gagan because I figured he just thought he was good at design when really he wasn’t.

Then all of a sudden in November 2008 Gagan IMs me & tells me that they now have new better graphic web designers.

Stupid me believes him.

He sends me some URLs to view & I liked 1 of them, so I said I wanted to see more just from that one designer. After seeing only 1 or 2 more URLs & confirming that the work would only be done by one person, I told Gagan that I ONLY want that ONE graphic web designer to do the work;  he says fine.

I should have asked to speak to the graphic web designer myself, but I didn’t, I let Gagan manage things.

They started off doing just a header for a blog, something simple.

After 9 days, it turns out my assistant Andy & I wasted our precious time with Gagan & we got NO design out of the deal.

Not only did the header style not even come close to the 2 designs I saw from the the graphic web designer I had requested, I had to walk them through 9 days of changes every step of the way.

Mid way through the work, I had already decided that I didn’t like the design enough to even contemplate giving them future work. At that point I thought I would at least get the one design done for our blog, but nooooo I didn’t even receive that in the end & here’s why.

The design was finally finished on the 8th day after I felt like I did more of the designing then they did since I feel the first mockup design should look close to perfect when I get it & only minor changes should be made. But with these guys, I had to tell them what I didn’t like so they kept changing things trying to get me something I did like. That to me is a terrible designer. They are grasping at straws.

At one point Andy said the way the border was done was amateurish & no real designer designs like that, as it’s like a child using a crayon. I of course didn’t know what he was talking about, but I trust Andy on this.

Anyway, the header is done & passable, so I ask Gagan for the item codes to the pictures from istock & I send them off to Andy to purchase the photos so Gagan can have the designer insert them for us & we could finish up.

Well guess what….

I don’t believe for one minute now that it was this other graphic web designer I liked who was doing the work, or maybe it was someone else, but they didn’t do the web designs I saw that I liked, anyway, without even asking me first, Gagan or whomever was doing the design, decided to use vector images which costs around 10 times more than the price of regular photos.

Andy tells me that it’s common practice to ALWAYS check with the manager or owner first before deciding to use more expensive images & Gagan never even mentioned these were vector images. So that really upset me to realize this after me wasting 8 days working with him.

Also another issue I had, was that I had told Gagan to not IM me unless it was really important. I remember even telling him this last time back in May, but every day when I’d get to my computer there would be an IM from Gagan & one night while I was working late, he kept bothering me while I was in the middle of working.

I find all East Indians are like this, they don’t listen, they just do whatever they want & I had to yell at him last time just to get him to STOP IMing me willy nilly, & to just e-mail me, only IMing me when it was really important.

This all coupled with my experience with Arjun also from Softobiz, I felt like I was used, they lied to me numerous times, & they had been trying to rip me off & here’s why…

Gagan referred me to Arjun saying he was a website coder. We are also hiring a website coder, so I said ok, send me his validated W3C URLs.

He does, & Andy says they are fine, so I proceed to interview Arjun & then give him the preliminary task of upgrading our CMS we use to run all our sites.

Something moved me to ask him how long it would take him to upgrade the CMS. I knew from the last website coder, that it was around 1-2 hours, so when he gives me an estimate of 15-20 hours, I get very upset feeling like he’s trying to rip me off, or he’s just not very smart.

I thought it was just because he doesn’t know this CMS very well even though I specifically told him to familiarize himself with it before he does any work on it & he told me he had.

He even claimed that he’s done this with other CMSs & this is the normal amount of time that it takes, but I couldn’t believe it.

I told him I was going to get Andy to do one upgrade to see how long it takes him & then let him know.

Andy hasn’t completed upgrading it 100%, but so far just to backup the files it only took him 30 minutes.

So all & all both times I wasted my time with this company & their staff, & I will NEVER deal with them again. It was my fault for giving them a second chance, but I live to learn.

Carrie-Ann applied to our Technical & Admin position.

I interviewed her & then asked her to resend me her references, as I was pretty sure she was in our top 3 of potential candidates. She said she would, then she disappeared. I even e-mailed her again to see what was up, & still no response 4 days later.

Carrie-Ann Brady wasted almost 2 hours of my precious time.

Kevin Hollinsky from Windsor, Ontario responded to my hiring ad for a plumber to do a quick plumbing job installing a water unit. I told him the water unit would be coming on Tuesday & he told me to call him if I was still interested.

On Tuesday at 2:30 am I e-mailed him telling him I had to run out to do grocery shopping & would call him when I was back.

I called him as well & left him a message.

Not only did he not return my e-mail, he didn’t return my call & he left me stranded with no plumber.

Very respectful human being.

Jo Anne Jones was hired from oDesk for the position of HR consultant & recruiter.

She claimed she had TONS of experience in this area & that she was currently an online College Professor training people how to use MS products.

“8.5 years experiences working in the online environment including recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and training virtual administrative and technical support personnel.”

and

“I am a college professor with a primary responsibility of communicating virtually with adult learners and ensuring clarity, conciseness, and understanding of concepts. In this position, I teach office software applications, professional communications, and management information systems.”

We were excited to bring Jo Ann onboard & she had also been asked if she was skilled in other areas like research, editing, & more.

Unfortunately the excitement was short lived.

Within 7 days I kept noticing that her written English wasn’t the best, so I had to really concentrate on all her e-mails to understand what she was saying. It was clear she never edited her e-mails.

We gave Jo Ann multiple tasks of varying sorts & out of all the tasks given to her only 2-3 were done properly & the rest were never completed or even started.

She was supposed to be a 10 on Excel, but she didn’t edit one of the formulas properly, & I noticed a week or so later than something that was tracking the quantity column was no longer working.

She was supposed to correct something else in the excel file, but she didn’t. She used the excuse that I told her not to do the work on the file. What I had told her, was that she had to do the work on the file before I needed it again, so every night I would e-mail her the file expecting to see the newest file in my inbox when I returned to work.

Unfortunately because she wasn’t doing the work in a prompt manner, it never got done. I had sent her the file 2 nights earlier.

She was supposed to be a 10 in Word, so I gave her a simple table I had created myself & asked her if she could redesign it so it was easier to use. 3-4 tries later & me having to correct her multiple mistakes, I finally got something I could use, but some of the lines were bolded. When I commented on it, I felt she lied & said it wouldn’t print out that way. Of course I printed it out after we terminated her position, & of course it printed out that way. I could have done what she did in less time & with no stress. I feel we paid for nothing.

She was supposed to find a collection agency for us by either researching online, or using the few leads we gave her to screen them. I found out after she was gone that she lied to one of the people she gave us & told them we had hundreds or thousands of debtors to give them. I had never told her how many files we had to give to the collection agency. She never even asked.

She was to edit some pre-screening documents, but in the end I did most of the editing which told me right there she wasn’t even close to being a good editor. The only thing I was pleased with on that task, was that she made one file look nicer & she joined 2 files together.

There were other tasks she was supposed to do like add URLs to an existing file that already had URLs. She was supposed to review the URLs first to make sure they were okay to add to the list. She didn’t do that task. The closest she came was creating a brand new file with 4-5 URLs. I’m not even sure she got them from our list. She could have searched for them because once again she didn’t understand the task given to her.

When I had my assistant review her small list, he said 2-3 out of the 3-4 URLs were no good. They weren’t getting any traffic, & the other site was just selling something, not providing a service. That is part of doing great research.

She being the so called HR person should have been on top of everything as far as company policies go, but she didn’t do anything.

She was supposed to list all her tasks on our online management system, provide dates as to when they would be completed, then check off whether she started on them, etc. She listed only 2 tasks & one was a task that should have been broken down into multiple tasks, so I asked her to separate all the positions she was supposed to be recruiting for. She never did. She also didn’t list the other tasks she never did or even the ones she did do.

She was supposed to send us Daily Updates at the end of her shift, I never received even one.

There were several more tasks she was told to do & she didn’t do any of them. One task she told me she didn’t feel comfortable doing & that was fine by me, but by the time she told me this, I had had it up to here with her already, so I terminated her very quickly when it was clear nothing was getting done.

She wasn’t responding back in a timely manner to my e-mails & her level of skill was so poor, almost every task with the exception of 1 or 2 had to be checked & rechecked by me or my assistant, or redone.

I later found out she was charging me for phone calls where work was never done. I would give her a rundown on what kind of task I wanted done, she would charge me to tell her what I needed done, yet the task was never done.

In the end I didn’t want to argue about it, so I just paid her & said good riddance, but then 2 weeks after I had given her my feedback on oDesk which was clearly not positive, she ran to oDesk & told them our job opening was violating their terms & conditions because while I don’t feel our site is adult in nature, our clients are adult in nature.

She never dealt with our clients, & she had no problems working for our company. She was aware that we are sort of an adult company even before she responded to our hiring ad, but that didn’t stop her from running to tattle on us to oDesk in order to get the job posting removed.

I was concerned that her negative feedback wouldn’t show up, but oDesk has rest assured me this doesn’t affect any feedback left about her.

I feel her actions are devious, & unethical.

She is also an Herbal Life distributor just in case you need to know that information. I now no longer trust Herbal Life, because she sold me a product that she said lasted her daughter 3 months. I got the product & there is no way ever that this would last 3 months, even one month is questionable. Even another Herbal Life distributor was shocked that Jo Anne Jones said that.

tranquilityrose - her handle on the site we got her from http://www.workathomemafia.com

Erika Meiser responding to our hiring ad for an HR Manager & recruiter. She read over our pre-screening docs & said she loved them. I was busy, so I couldn’t get to her interview immediately & she followed up asking me if the position was still available as she was very interested in it.

I spent over 2 hours interviewing her & at the end she wanted to know when she could start, what tasks she would be doing, etc.

We discussed money & she seemed willing to work with us so it would be beneficial for everyone.

She was told to send me the signed documents the following day, but the following day I heard nothing from her.

I decided to wait just one more day to see if maybe she had e-mailed me & I just didn’t receive it because e-mail isn’t reliable, but nothing even the 2nd day after the interview.

Erika clearly said she’s able to weed out the flakes online who aren’t serious about working with an online company, & she’s placed hundreds of people in various different companies. What she failed to mention, is that I feel she is one of those flakes.

After further investigation, things started to seem fishy.

Her website was only registered a month ago, yet she claims she has been working online for over 8 years. Maybe she only decided to register her company last month, but I don’t know.

Then I realized that even though we ask everyone for references in the hiring ad, she didn’t give us any, nor did she give us her strengths & weaknesses. This was definitely an error on my part for not screening her properly, but that still doesn’t excuse her ignoring us. She is online & active from what we can see.

I found Jason from Ohio on this message board - http://www.wickedfire.com & contacted him on August 29, 2008.

I asked him if he was available to do work for us & he said yes, his turnaround time was 12 days.

I sent him a list of questions which he was surprised about. That should have been my first clue that he’s unprofessional, & that anything that isn’t 100% easy for him meant he was eventually going to cause me a who lot of stress. Sometimes I never learn.

Any real professional shouldn’t be surprised at all by simple pre-sale questions, so it was clear to me that none of his clients really send him questions prior to hiring him.

I was very patient with him waiting for over a day each time just to get a response back from him & I told him I would like all the preliminary issues to be finalized by the end of the weekend & it was even a long weekend, so I thought it wasn’t that big a deal to expect us to address my simple questions by September 2, 2008. Boy was I wrong.

Then he tells me he doesn’t use Photoshop, he uses Corel PSP x2 which doesn’t produce PSDs, only PSP images. I discuss this with my assistant who says there should be a way to save it as a PSD. I don’t hear back from Jason until 2 days later. He tries to make excuses that the Corel won’t save the image properly & his friend & him tested this out.

Since I’m really being patient here, I tell him that I’d like this all finalized (not the design, just all the business type issues) by this coming Saturday, as it’s already been a week now & not much has been settled which means I can’t even order anything from this guy. This is when he starts to piss me off telling me I should probably go look for another designer. I was waiting on this unprofessional graphic web designer this whole time & NOW he decides to tell me this, so I tell him this is VERY unfair to me to keep me waiting & can he sent a copy of that file to my assistant to fool around with it, & I give him the e-mail address.

Here’s where I really lost my temper.

Jason has the NERVE to tell me that he told me he was too busy, that he was busy this weekend etc. (all lies). Jason never told me that it would take this long to deal with simple payment & file type questions, I mean come on, my questions should take no more than 15-30 minutes to talk about via IM.

He tells me his other clients are obviously way more important than me (great business person - NOT) & that he knows I’m going to be difficult, so I should go find someone else. When people are a certain way, they tend to tell others they are just like them. Jason was clearly difficult to deal with, so he tries to make ME out to be the problem instead of accepting responsibility for his mistakes, miscommunication, unprofessionalism etc. Then he lied again on the message board when I warned others about him saying he NEVER told me he didn’t want to work with me & to find some other graphic web designer.

I guess saying: “I can already tell you’re going to be extremely difficult to work with, so I would prefer if you found another designer.

Thanks for your time.

- Jason”

doesn’t mean that Jason told us to go take a hike. Boy, don’t graphic web designers understand the same English language I do?

Once again, these arrogant, unprofessional, immature graphic web designers string a professional business along, lie about when they are or not available, & cause me to lose my temper.

When will I ever learn that these graphic web designers who come from these message boards aren’t respectful, they don’t really care about anything but money, because if they cared about the person, they would be upfront & honest & say they can’t address any of this now, please check back in 2 weeks when a lot of my work has settled down, but Jason never said that.

And what kind of a designer can’t even produce a simple PSD file?

<sigh>

Erik saw our hiring ad for a W3C Website Coder on http://forums.digitalpoint.com/ (his user name is depi)

He PMed me asking me to look at his site http://youweyoucoding.com

I had my assistant look over the code to make sure it was valid, & he said it was fine.

I started communicating with Erik wanting to know specific details, if we could go hourly, etc.

I asked him to fill out our online application, but first he wanted to see what kinds of headers needed coding, so I gave him several that had already been done.

That was the last I heard from him & it’s been 2 days now.

Very unprofessional, rude & disrespectful.

If he had a problem, Erik needs to learn how to communicate & say what the problem is. I don’t read minds, & I don’t like being strung along wasting my time.

Michelle

Germantown, Tennessee

Stephan applied to our W3C website coder position & everything was fine until he started contradicting himself.

He said he was at a computer all day for his other job, & was a 8 out of 10 in response to any e-mails that would be sent to him.

I started to realize there was something fishy & irresponsible about him when after the first day of talks he didn’t write back until 9 pm.

I commented on it, confirmed he couldn’t work until after 7 pm, & asked him to IM me from Yahoo to get the pre-screening docs.

Never heard from him again.

Stephan Riley wasted my time saying he was looking for work, only to disappear. Stephan’s actions were clearly very disrespectful & unprofessional.

Jamie applied to our website coder position.

He really wanted the job & I was surprised he actually read over everything & answered all our questions.

I interviewed him & I realized he also knew PHP programming, so I started asking him questions about that too.

I asked him if he was potentially interested in that position too, as they would both be part time positions.

He said yes, & I said ok, we will need a sample script from you.

After the interview, I proceeded to screen his references. That is when things went downhill.

I wrote an e-mail to him stating I still hadn’t heard from his references.

A whole day went by & he didn’t log onto Yahoo (one very specific way we communicate with team members), I received no response to my e-mail, & he didn’t answer his phone & I called several times.

Finally at the end of the day I e-mailed again asking what in the world was going on.

He wrote back saying he was waiting on me.

I explained to him that he has to communicate with me, he can’t just not respond to e-mails.

I started to get concerned that his communication skills weren’t up to our standards.

The next day he said I should hear back from his references. I did & decided to hire him, so I let him know that he had to send us a few signed sheets including our NDA. He said he would send them the next day.

I expected to get them first thing in the morning. I didn’t.

I didn’t hear from him, so I called him.  He seemed kind of out of it, but said he’d send me the documents in a couple of hours as soon as he got his scanner or fax machine up & running.

He apologized in his e-mail & said he hadn’t started studying CMS Made Simple, because he wasn’t sure he had the job. Fine, I understood.

Once I got the documents from him, I expected him to start right away, but once again, he seemed out of it. I asked him when I was going to get the sample script since he had said I would get it by Thursday & it was now Thursday.

He sort of hymed & hawed & I said it doesn’t sound like you are ready to start.

He asked me if he could start on Monday & I said fine, but I was already having reservations.

For someone who told me he really wanted the job & was interested, he sure didn’t care about starting.

Sure enough 2 days later he e-mails me with some story about getting a job at the government.

While he apologized, I wasn’t happy at all.

Jamie Calder had just wasted about 3-4 hours of my time & led me on. At no time did he tell me he was out there looking for offline work. He clearly stated he wanted to be an independent contractor working online.

He wasted my time & energy.

I decided to e-mail him a few days later to see if he wanted part time work. That is when I was 100% certain he had been lying to me, he never even responded to my e-mail.

Another one of those flaky independent contractors who lead companies on wasting their time & lying.