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CLEAR AGREEMENT AND IN WRITING QUORA: I'll tell you how I got my revenge and what happened to me when I was on a corporate assignment. Original article: Burgess COMMENTARY Peter Burgess | ||
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Johnny Strawberry
Minimalist nomad & digital marketing specialist Translator 1 year
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Larry Pyeatt
Location: Rapid City, SD ( 2012 – present )
This answer may not be a faithful translation of the answer of
Larry Pyeatt
in Quora in English :
I got a contract job at a graduate school (that was about 30 years ago) with the job of designing a peripheral board for a PC. The company made scales and wanted to interface the sensors with the PC to build a new scale. It's common these days, but it was recent and new technology at the time. I designed the device and prepared a prototype. It looked like the photo above. I wrote a simplistic program and demonstrated it. It worked the way they wanted and they asked me to design a PCB for production. At that time I asked them to pay for what I had done so far. I gave them my bill. It included buying all the parts as well as my hourly rate of $10.00 per hour as per our verbal agreement, which was cheap for that kind of work even back then. The next day I went to get my check. They paid for all the parts, but changed my hourly labor rate to $3.35, which was minimum wage at the time. I asked to speak to the principal and asked him why he was only paying part of what the school owed me. And he replied that since I had done it so quickly and it had worked immediately, the work had therefore not been so difficult and that it did not justify a remuneration higher than the minimum wage. I went home. Two days later, he called to find out how the creation of the circuit board was going. I told him that I would not design the card. He replied that he wanted me to return all the equipment he had paid for and the circuit diagrams. To which, I replied: Ok, I have classes for the rest of the day, please send someone at 9:00 tomorrow to pick him up. And I gave him my address. That evening, while I was watching Dr. Who on the local TV channel, I unplugged all the wires and put them neatly in a plastic bag. I removed each chip (about twenty chips) and put them in an antistatic bag. I took out each connector and put them away in a box. Then I ran the diagrams through my paper shredder before putting them away in another bag. I then carefully stuffed the whole thing into a shoebox and gave it to the guy who showed up the next day. The manager contacted me during the day and asked me to put everything back together and provide him with the electronic circuit diagram. I told him that I had given him the schematic, but unfortunately it had fallen into my document shredder. I also told him that he had everything he had paid for and that I was sure he could find someone else to fix it. Three years later, they still didn't have a working product. I think they finally did it, but it took them almost ten years. At the time, there weren't many people in that part of the country who had any basic knowledge of digital logic, and especially very few people who knew how to build a peripheral board that could connect to a PC. Later he hired a person I knew and he did the same thing to him. I even remember that this experience did not annoy me more than that. I sighed, analyzed this experience and continued on my way. But I remembered two things that I will never forget: always get a written agreement and check the reputation of the people you are going to work with before agreeing . So, yes, it was vindictive. Did it cost me anything? Not really. Did it cost him anything? Millions. WOW ! more than 6,000 positive votes in less than 24 hours! THANK YOU! I never thought that such a small event in my life would affect so many people!
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