Hi folks, I hope all are doing well. I want to have one suggestion from my community. Though Upwork has always helped me to gain high-quality clients. By high quality, I not only mean high paying clients but clients who speak neutral (concerns of both sides). So this particular talk is about one of the clients who hired me in February.
She was nice and calm in beginning and It was going well with her. Our words and way of work were resonating well. Being a social media manager, I work on a variety of tasks, from website management to ad management, and I was doing the same for her. By the time it was March, we had some back and forth in some tasks. Where I asked her to clear my doubts about that task. I asked her many times in form of short and long messages. She was talking about things of the whole world but did not clear that doubt. She thought it is unnecessary to clear that thing because it was something believed to be simple 'common sense' for her.
So I did that thing as a result of some internet research. After few days she bashed loudly at me, about why I did it that way and the irony is she said 'why you did not ask me.?' She was giving me a variety of tasks at $10/hour, but at a work limit of 5-6 hours/week. It was difficult to complete those things in such a short time. Whenever I was taking bit longer time to do something, she always took just 1 second to further lower my weekly limit. As an indirect expression of 'anger' and a hint to not take more time or maybe 'turn off meter sometimes'.
Being an agency owner, she has many employees and I expected things to be broad and easy within good work limits. But she was too miser. She paused my contract and did not message me for almost a month. She again jumped into my DM and asked me to again do a simple task. I agreed and the contract restarted.
Now this time, she was more rough and angry. The last time she said that I am giving suggestions after completing work in the wrong way, I should have given her knowledge and suggestions before things go the wrong way. So she gave me a weekly limit of 2 hours (seriously) to create 10 landing pages through a webpage builder, with manual time turned off. The pages were easy with just images and text. But regarding text, I had to take help from the internet and give some personal focus. So each page was work of 15-20 minutes.
From day one I expressed my concern of low work limit, but she always said that 'I know how much time it takes, You take a long time to do things which is unethical.' We had a bit of argument regarding few things, where I told her something from my knowledge. She told me in an angry way that I know everything (again not standing on her own words 'give your suggestions, you do not engage with our team').
When I explained her reasons why I did something in some particular way, she told me that I receive 10,000 DM on irrelevant topics. Do not disturb me. Again I was helpless and with an unclear doubt. I was not asking when is her birthday, how can a work-related topic be irrelevant. Now somehow the webserver stopped responding and the web builder stopped. She talked with the CRM support team. The next day she made fun of my digital skills and said 'I think from your digital background, you should have cleared cache and things would have worked'. I told her that from my digital background I used another device and the problem is still the same.
So now I am thinking to close the contract from my side as I do not want to work in too tight weekly work limits, rough speaking client and something which is having a bad effect on my other contracts. What do you guys suggest?
. Now edited, thanks.
