I’ve been a freelance writer for about three years now. As I do the bulk of my work through an online freelancing site which charges frankly ridiculously fees for using their platform, I have mercifully never had to suffer the headache of having to chase people for money, many of whom will doubtlessly never pay up. That’s not to say that people don’t try and scam me, and probably countless others, wherever possible.
I once applied for a proofreading job where the client asked me to do a free test first. This was somewhere in the region of 500 words and seemed to be an incomplete text. It doesn’t take that long to proofread and edit such a small amount of words and I did so and sent it back to the potential client. I then waited. And waited. And waited. No reply. It dawned on me afterwards that if this person had received 20 applicants and we’d all done a test, they were effectively getting 10,000 words proofread for free. A lesson learned, but one which only cost me half an hour of my time.
Another client I worked for for a while used to send me advertising email texts to translate from English to Norwegian. I was paid by the word and they always paid promptly after every job was completed. One day, they suddenly said that they wanted to pay me hourly instead of per word and asked how much I would charge. I calculated the number of words I could translate per hour and multiplied this by the already-agreed rate per word to give me an hourly rate figure. “That’s too much,” they said and then offered me half the amount. I said no. They said: “Well, you’ve worked for less than that before.” They had looked at my profile and seen that when I first started freelancing, in order to get some positive feedback on the board, I had written some articles for absolute peanuts. My client wouldn’t budge. That was the end of that working relationship.
Today, a client I have done proofreading work for for five months contacted me. They are effectively a middleman for clients in another part of the world who give them their poorly-written texts which I then polish or in some cases completely rewrite.
“The client says there are many grammatical errors. Please take another look.”
I thought it was strange and downloaded the attached document. It was a scientific paper which didn’t look like it had been edited by me. The language seemed wrong. I asked when the article had originally been edited. It was 42 days ago. That seemed even stranger. Who pays for work to be edited and then doesn’t check it for over 40 days? And also, there were no comments on the document at all. This is unusual. Any decent client who thinks something is wrong with an edited document will usually at the very least highlight areas of text they believe to be incorrect. I was apparently expected to edit the document in full again, as the claim was that I’d made mistakes.
I looked a bit closer and found the edited document which I had sent my client all those days ago. They weren’t the same. Well, they were in some places but not in others. Several of my edits had been ignored — I had made close to 700 edits in a 3,200-word document, which should give you some idea of what a car crash it originally was. That certainly accounted for some of the “errors”. But then I saw that they had completely rewritten some sentences in the document, as well as adding two new paragraphs to it. And I was supposed to do this work for free, under the guise of it being a re-editing job?
Not. A. Fucking. Chance.
I told my client what was happening at length and said that in order to do any work whatsoever on the document full payment would be required. I then received the usual casual response of “OK” which I’m pretty sure I’d also get if I told them the world was about to end or I’d killed their entire family.
I will assume that my client was unaware that their client was attempting to scam them and that a heated text exchange between the two parties occurred where a new arsehole was torn — was that perhaps what that Natalie Imbruglia song was about?
The reality was probably something like this though:
My client: He said no.
My client’s client: OK
My client: OK
So, it’s back to sitting with my thumb up my arse waiting for actual paid work to hopefully stream in. Or the next scammer to try it on. They’ll have to get up pretty early in the morning to get one over on me though.
Oh, hang on. I’ve just received a promising email. It says it’s from a Nigerian prince…
