Here's one for you. It's a long one, so I apologize in advance. This was several years ago: A company from California hired us to design, make and ship them lettering for their truck fleet. Considering they probably could have saved a bunch... Why they didn't have the work done locally didn't make since to us then, but it seemed like a legit job. It was a larger order so we took on the job.
We sent them a quote based on their request, and told them we would start production when we received half down. We didn't hear from them for a month or two. We figured our prices were too high for them. They finally called us back but changed the order. They needed twice as many graphics now. We send over the revised quote, and they paid half down later that week. We started production of the graphics.
Then they called a day later, We need those graphics ASAP. we removed our old graphics and we can't put the trucks back on the road until the new ones are on. Why they took the old graphics off without having the new ones in hand is a mystery to me. Looking back it was most likely the beginning of their many lies.
For whatever reason, we agreed to send them the graphics that we had finished... about half of them. But we told them we would then have to charge them shipping twice. They agreed. We sent them the graphics that were finished... next day air.
They contacted us 2 days later, complaining that the graphics hadn't reached them yet. We went online with our tracking information to see that the graphics were in fact delivered, and we pointed this out to them. They claimed that they didn't have them and wanted us to send the rest of the graphics and new ones to replace the graphics they said were lost in the mail.
We informed them since the graphics were accepted by someone at their business, we would have to charge for the new "replacement" graphics. This upset him. he got kind of nasty and hung up... By this time the 2nd half of the job was ready to ship. However, we waited to ship out the 2nd half of the job because the way the conversation ended, we were uncertain of whether or not they wanted to order the "replacement" graphics. They never did say. We tried contacting them the next day and the secretary said the boss was not in, and he would get back to us.
About a week or so later, the secretary called, "where are the rest of the graphics?" We told her they are done and we were waiting to hear back about the "replacement" graphics. She said "Okay I'll call you right back." A day later they call: "Well we did receive the first batch, but they aren't correct. They were supposed to be reflective." They claimed that the graphics that we sent were unusable because their trucks have to have reflective lettering to be legal. (huh?)
We scanned and emailed them the work orders, sketches, quotes, email communications that all had no mention of reflective, which they had signed off on. They claimed they told us over the phone that we were to make the graphics in reflective.
Then they threatened to sue us because their trucks haven't been on the road for weeks because of us.
Now when someone threatens to sue us, that's usually when we end a business relationship. Long story a bit shorter, we eventually worked out an agreement and got paid in full and they got the 2nd half of their original order which were already produced, and nothing more. We were never sued.
Later that year the secretary called us back and wanted to hire us to build their website. I said "absolutely not. The last time we did business with you, it didn't go very well." She apologized up one side and down the other, they even sent us flowers believe it or not
Nope. Have someone else do your work.
This was actually the straw that broke the camels back and because of it we have a policy of not doing out of state sign work, with the exception of murals. We will also do design work for anyone, but we just had one too many bad experiences with out of state sign work.
