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Thanks for all of the great inputs, everyone. I've cut 'n' pasted much of
it into a response letter I'm going to now carefully massage.
This assignment is coming through the marketing manager, and it's her
budget. To date, the company has OEM'd its mobos, and has likely used the
user manuals from the OEM supplierrs. This is their first foray into having
a mobo of their own, along with a first-go at an accompanying user manual.
In short, the mktg mgr doesn't know what she doesn't know. And although
I've been wooing the company for over half a year by way of their digital
mktg person (and a few others I've found on LinkedIn), the mktg mgr still
hasn't accepted my LI [Connect] invitation and hasn't bothered to view my
LI extensive profile (although I keep gently prodding her to do so).
I've supplied several user manual samples I've created to demonstrate that
I have the chops. Yet we still do the "What's your price"? game. And from
what I've just conveyed, you might surmise that the mktg. mgr. has no
concept of how time to schedule for user manual creation, nor does she have
any clear idea of all that's involved. It's just like jotting down an egg
casserole recipe, right?
I'm fully prepared to walk away from this, but still want to explore the
viability of actually pulling it off within her absurdly ridiculous time
frame (as if I don't have a roster of other clients to attend to, right?).
Frankly, after all of the merry-go-round these past few weeks (she was out
one of them), and what I perceived as a great phone interchange with a
product mgr., I've really peeved by the deadlineânever mind having to
provide a total project estimate. We all know that these things take as
long as they take, always with an eye toward an approaching, *realistic*
deadline. This isn't how I want to start our relationshipâif we're to have
one.
Pulling an occasional all-nighter or working through a holiday weekendâat a
premium hourly rate, mind youâis something I really only care to do once or
twice a year. And that's provided I've got a favored client on the other
hand who already loves my work and with whom I can joke when I get
punch-drunk during such exhilarating times.
