| Are you actually me? This sounds so familiar, I just had a flashback... Get a lawyer, like everyone else is saying. The fundamental fault I made was not enforcing my boundaries - this is the purpose of lawyers, to help you do this, but you first have to be aware of it yourself. So if you are not very familiar with contract law, learn the basics and how to analyze a contract etc. Apologies if I'm assuming things, but my assumption based on what you are saying is that you aren't. I would recommend this to -everyone- in the IT field - there is now far too money sloshing around and every clever asshole out there is hell bent on becoming the next Steve Jobs. And learn a bit about the Loser/Clueless/Sociopath theory of management - I ended up working for a bona fide sociopath, as it turned out... I too quasi-capped my invoices on this hell of a project - I lowered my rate for certain types of tasks, given they were mostly data entry like stuff, so it seemed logical and at that point, I was psychologically mired in the whole thing. Somehow this website I was hired to build turned into my being the entire IT staff for a enterprise B2B startup. As in everything - sysadmin to QA to CTO. I finally snapped out of it when a) the CEO lied to a customer about the data we were selling - blatant negotiation in bad faith and the customer was going to sue (and mostly definitely win) and B) it became apparent how they were playing 3 card monte with the invoices and lying to all the salesguys and me about cash flow issues while they paid off the loans their OTHER company had made to fund the startup. So everyone working for this company quit. It took us 6+ months to get paid back because the CEO's wife then went and started pulling crap, reinterpreting contracts and claiming people were not owed so much money... I too, like lots of contractors, have a commitment to the job and professionalism that you exhibited - I am certainly not faulting you for that. But you have to realize some clients will consciously take advantage of that - read up on manipulative people and how to deal with them. A good book is "In Sheep's Clothing" by George Simon. Then I suggest some deep soul searching / psychoanalysis to figure out what your blinds spots were and why - it was all a valuable lesson for me and I suppose it would have happened someday. I can say it was ultimately useful. But 4 years of hell is a long time to waste. So I hope you can find the silver lining in all this and I wish you luck. |