Racism Rears MY Ugly Head???

I have stepped on the racism land mine.  The client who accepted my proposal to write a grant for her more than a week ago, spent a week "renegotiating" the contract so that my hourly fee was cut by 10%, my agents fees were going to be paid by me and my up front retainer which covered 10 hours of work and a written report I submitted was being eliminated altogether.  We had a Skype conversation in which the client blocked her camera so I could not see her face, but she could see me.  After I turned in the grant review, she canceled the contract, slandered me and told my agent she felt like I had delayed the work and didn't want to work with her because of her race.

This is ludicrous.  I don't want to work with her because she's unethical, not because she belongs to whatever unnamed race she belongs to. You don't accept a proposal with clearly defined terms and then try to weasel a bunch of free work out of the person even before the contract starts.  I saw it coming and I still acted in good faith despite my concerns, giving my client the benefit of the doubt that she would pay as she promised.

The problem is not race, it's penury, incompetence and lack of ethics. The grant proposal reminded me of one a reviewer once described as "two unemployed liberal social workers looking to create for themselves jobs which don't require any real work or have to show any real results".  That problem has nothing to do with race.  That problem is all about blaming the inadequacy of your own efforts on anything and everyone but yourself. She didn't want to hear that she wasn't ready to do the grant. She wanted me to make the grant happen anyway.  And had they not done their part of the grant, they could have blamed me and refused to pay me.  Not only that, but if the information in the grant was discovered by grant monitors to turn out to be not strictly true, then I could be held responsible and the feds will hurt you for lying on a grant.

Bet I know which party my client belongs to.

And now I've wasted another hour answering this slander to my agency.  If you don't want to do the grant with me, then don't, but skip the nasty pot shots on the way out the door, okay? 

Moving on.....

Tom King
(c) 2013