About a month ago I submitted a proposal to a job posting. Within minutes I began speaking with the job poster. I am new to freelancing and this ended up being my first client.
She was quite frantic and her messages seemed chaotic, but I was assuming it was due to a time crunch so I just rolled with it. Originally it was a $100 fixed price project. I spoke with her via upwork's video calls (well mainly she spoke, would ask a question, then would speak over me as I would attempt answering her question) and explained the nuances of what she was looking for in her project. She agreed to hire me as an ML expert to create few ML models for her paper. A long story short, she continually changed the scope and expectations of the job almost daily until I put my foot down. We agreed to change the job to be billed at an hourly rate. I updated the proposal and asked her to accept the changes.
She did not, and then she inevitably changed the expectations once again.
By the time I finished all my work, I was at a total of 14.5 hours at $40/hr. I got confirmation that my work was completed and then updated the proposal and asked her to accept the changes. Right after that, I didn't hear from her for about 10 days. Given that she had made every single step of the process so difficult with her rude, pushy, hectic, and disorganized communication (she at one point tried to tell me that I couldn't bill her for video calls, but luckily she came to understand that was false) I was worried she wouldn't pay me. I had left a few follow up messages and then finally mentioned that if I didn't hear back from her I would be reporting her to Upwork. Miraculously 10 minutes later she gave me an excuse as to why she wasn't responding and that she would oblige with closing out the job as I requested. I then updated the proposal and kindly asked her to accept the proposed. Once again, another week went by and she did not accept the changes or message me back. So I reached out again and she changed the topic of discussion to the fact that she needed to change her payment method. I checked the "view details" link for the proposal changes I made to see if she accepted, but this time it brought be to a page with this error message :
"This job has been removed from Upwork, so we are no longer able to retrieve your proposal."
At this point I don't know what to do and I am totally at my wit's end. I just want my interaction with this client to end and get paid but I have no idea how. Can some one please:
1) help me find a way to get the proposal/job back up? or how to get paid by my client in some roundabout way if we cannot get the job back up
2) assist me in the steps of reporting this client and getting her removed from this platform. She was so rude, inconsiderate, pushy , manipulative and just overall completely toxic for this platform. No freelancer deserves to be spoken to or treated like this, especially when you go above and beyond to help the client.
