Indermeet and I had worked together for over four years. He first hired me to do an eBay auction template and since then has had me do various IT related things for him. We've become good friends over this period of time quickly after we first met.
So when I was doing his web site, he was real picky and wanted all kinds of features. He kept criticizing it after it was done and wanted it re-done with more features and functions. Being his friend made this process a quagmire where he knew he could get more out of me than he deserved. I did ask for occasional stipends to be able to survive on as he was taking so much of my time from other work, he ended up paying me a few hundred dollars here and there over the course of four years.
I was doing so much work for him and custom making everything to his specifications, that it was obvious he wasn't compensating me enough for all this work. He had told me on several occasions that I was not a hireling but a business partner to him, and in this context we talked about fair compensation and agreed to having a sales percentage of his sales through the web site I was creating for him. This is something we talked about and agreed upon several times over the last two years of this work.
The last bit of work that needed to be done took about 6 months. I had to, of course, do other work to survive and in the first two and half years he was a task master coming over and slave driving me sitting next to me and making sure I didn't do other things as he wanted his things done. He would criticize me for doing other work, and generally try to get into my head and use me. So in the last year I got him to get off my back and leave me alone. He would contact me a few times and I would let him know I was working on it.
The last part was a lot of tedious menial work, going through thousands of lines of text data brought over from all the old versions of the site I had created and reformatting it. He insisted on bringing over the old data and making it all fit with all of the custom CMS functionality he wanted. All this was created from scratch for him as he insisted it should be, even though downloadable templates like Open Cart, were presented to him as an option in the beginning. During this tedious work it wasn't necessary to contact him for updates, since it was just menial work and a lot of it.
I finally got to the programmatic part in the last month and was able to put together his custom CMS from there. If anyone knows anything about programming this isn't a small task to do in a month. He had contacted me to get an update and I told him I was close and that I would contact him when I was close to being done, probably in a week or so. It took a month in reality but he had no reason to think I was not working on it as he saw how much I did on it for four years and how committed I was to finishing it, with little pay then and the promise of pay after it was done.
When I contacted him at the month mark, he informed me that he had his brother do the site for him. I was upset by this but I let him know his commitment to have me compensated and that he was still obligated to do so. His reply was that he wanted to see what his brother had done and that he'd let me know what he wanted after that. The next contact from him was that his brother was done and he wanted me to take down his web site from my server.
All his communications with me are usually critical and negative, but this time his tone was upbeat as he felt he was getting over and didn't need to depend on me to do his work. I wrote him back reminding him of the compensation he needed to give me and he replied with me needing to be sympathetic to his plight as business owner not making enough money from the site I had previously created for him. I wrote him back correcting his false assertions that I am incompetent and incapable of creating a web site, and at my anger at his simply walking away from his commitment to pay me after robbing four years of my work life.
I checked out his new site and it is Open Cart, the free downloadable shopping cart engine that I had shown him before. It was put together by some Indian company named Mxicoders.com and it was hosted on his brother's free hosting account on host gator dot com. They had taken all of my layout work, logic, navigation, and design and simply replaced the Open Cart template with my work, a close resemblance to the site that I did. I had also done all of the non-coding work for this site, organizing the files, making it have a cohesive flow, naming things, and so forth. They took it all and just plugged it into Open Cart removing any reference to Open Cart or me. I checked back a week later and he was using all of the SEO techniques he had learned from me while sitting next to me all those years and sucking my brain to learn about web marketing.
So now he's sitting pretty poised to earn a lot of money having a fancy plug n play web site that is SEO optimized and he's just dropped me like a hot potato, after using me for all the trial and error and as a learning tool for four years. There's a lot I could say about this, anyone can ask me any questions about it. I also have the code I did for him and can use it to make any store anyone wants to pay me for. I also know more SEO techniques than what he sucked from me so if anyone has a teak furniture website that is competing with his, I'll help you beat him.
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