J. and I ended up holed up in the apartment next to the fire eating take-out and playing cribbage by candlelight. It was an enforced vacation from the website I was rushing to get online by Thursday. I needed it badly.
The next day, I uploaded the website for my client. He had made several changes to the original mockup and there wasn’t time to continue revising mockups, so I made the changes and then coded the site. He called me and spent thirty minutes telling me how it looked thrown together and how he wasn’t going to use it even though he had put me on such a nasty deadline and was the one who had wanted the changes in the first place. I was very polite on the phone, but I emailed him today to let him know that I have spent enough time on this (gratis) project, and I have other projects that take priority now, so no, I’m not willing to go back to the original and code it. On the one hand I feel vindicated – my design instincts were right on. On the other hand, after a week like I had, where I didn’t sleep for THREE NIGHTS in a row to meet this guy’s deadline, in the midst of power outages and friends in grief and meeting my other responsibilities to work my ass off and have it thrown in my face was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I needed a beer, a back rub, and a good movie on tv. Instead, I baked a spice cake. With butter cream frosting.
This week is going to be better, just through my own sheer stubbornness.