**Perspectives of a Seller:**
I still remember my first job. It was my 24th bid. It was for $115 and I thought it would take me 5+ hours to complete. I’d tried everything from really short responses, to long ones, highlighted ones to plain text. Finally, I shut my eyes, and relented... “paying my dues" I thought, and I clicked submit.
A day later I looked at my email and noticed a contact from the buyer... my heart skipped a beat and I smiled, thinking, “they’ve accepted" I clicked it open. What I saw, was not what I’d hoped... it was actually a thinly veiled scope creep request. I relented an extra 2 hours.
The request was to do some statistical analysis on a data set to answer a few business questions. So I anticipated receiving a database file as I’d received in my corporate analysis days. What I did receive was a partially corrupted CSV file with application and data level idiosyncrasies, data definition gaps. It needed tremendous data cleansing effort to get it to even half passable status.
By now you get the point, if anything could have gone wrong it did. At every turn, I had every reason to chuck the job. I had every reason to hold up my hands and say “I didn’t expect this, its not fair, I didn’t want this, I need more..." But something told me not to.
Instead I looked at my client’s fog, their darkness, their perspective. I saw what they didn’t know... I saw their confusion, I saw their fear of getting ripped off.
- This has been a guest post by Malcolm Mckinnon
