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Originally Posted by soundman98
All this over fkn $3k. Most monthly payroll expenses are bigger. Glad to hear they ruled in your favor. It never should have gone this far for such a petty sum for a company.
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You assume they have the $3K to pay. They could be operating by the skin of their teeth. They may not even be paying their people.
I worked for a company like that. It was a television production company whose owner regularly appeared as a foreign correspondent on Fox News Channel as well as numerous overseas networks. We had offices in DC, New York, London, Moscow, Tel Aviv, Beijing and Tehran. We served networks in the US, India, Singapore, South Africa, New Zealand and Switzerland. We had correspondents spread all over the globe.
You would think that a company like that would have lots of cash on hand. But I shared a very cramped office with the bookkeeper (because we couldn't afford more space--our producer's desk blocked the kitchen sink) and got to see the "past due" notices roll in every month and hear the bookkeeper's regular "What the fuck?" when she was trying to keep everything in balance.
We were paid monthly, and our paycheck deposits were regularly up to two weeks late. As the only person who could operate the camera, I was in an essential position and finally told him after six months of late paychecks that I'd have to find another job if I wasn't paid on time, because my landlord expected the rent regardless of when I got paid. I found out later he started paying me out of a different account and continued to delay the others. I found out because he had complained to the bookkeeper that ADP was charging him extra for the separate monthly transfer.
He ran the business out of his $50K line of credit, until the line of credit was maxed out, and then he would play round robin with which invoices he didn't pay this month. He pushed off repair bills for our aging gear until it broke again and our technician (the only guy in town who would service our gear) wouldn't touch it until the past due bills were paid up. Can't make television without a camera. (Well, you
can, if you don't mind a green tint to the video.)
The boss would pull employees off our contract clients to pursue quick money-making jobs to keep us afloat, at one point delaying our news stories to one of our client networks so long that they threatened to sue him for breach of contract. He even took on lobbyist clients to make actual fake news about the industries they represented, which he then put on the Associated Press news feed as real news stories (in blatant violation of the AP contract). I shot "news" stories about Omega 3 supplements that were paid for by a supplement industry trade group and made it on the air on television stations all around the US.
And all those "bureaus" around the world? They were really one-person operations usually run out of the correspondent's apartment. Those people didn't get paid on time either.
One day we were instructed to lock the front door and continue working, but not open the door if someone knocked or tried to get in. I don't think anybody ever showed up, but we never got an explanation for that one.
That company is still in business. I have no doubt he's still running it the same way. If you asked him about any of this, he would deny every single item on the list. He was in such a state of denial about how bad the company was running that he'd just block it out and not even believe it himself, even though he was there. You can't run a company this way and
not be in denial, because otherwise if you let yourself acknowledge how bad it is, you have to admit the best thing to do is shut down.
Applying what I learned there to the way Works has been described, I can see many similarities. I suspect the guy really intended to have the turbo ready when he originally said he would. I suspect the disaster of incompetently running his business on a shoestring got in the way of that. Maybe employees quit, or maybe he had to repurpose them to other jobs to get cash flow coming in just to keep the lights on. Prototyping those few parts would be delayed because that also costs money he likely didn't have.
If you had gone to my former employer and said, "You owe me $3000," he wouldn't pay. If you got a judgment, he still wouldn't pay, because he simply wouldn't have it without shifting something around and screwing somebody else. Once it's a judgment it's a lost cause, so why end up with another judgment from stiffing someone else to pay the first one?
At some point "not giving in" becomes a way of doing business, and at that point he may actually be willing to spend MORE money on fighting it than if he just paid the damned judgment to begin with.
But then, he may be stiffing his lawyer also.
Quote:
Originally Posted by TachyonBomb
I really hope they don't take too long responding to me or paying me. It would reflect very poorly on them. I honestly just want this ordeal to be over with and made right by them.
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I wouldn't get your hopes up. How would not paying reflect any more poorly on them than screwing you in the first place? At this point their reputation isn't going to be damaged any worse. The industry is full of guys like this that screw people over and just keep right on going. Look up the myriad complaints about John Hennessy screwing people over and literally stealing parts off people's cars.
Speaking of reputation, did you take down the photos the attorney sent you the C&D letter over? I was looking for them and couldn't find them.