I'm Going To Be on Judge Judy...
Or maybe that court show with the Latina--I wish it was going to be in the courtroom of local judge Isabel Gomez...I sat in on a juvenile trial in her courtroom when I was a high school student interning at the Hennepin County Public Defenders office...that woman scared me so badly...and I was just watching...that I didn't even think about joining the Mafia. But either way, I'm fixin' to take someone to small claims court, and its going to be REAL dramatic. All names in the following story have been changed.
I have a now former client, Macaroon, run by a woman named...let's call her...Crazy. I worked with Crazy for a little over three months. The first month I worked with her was hell on wheels. We took a month off from working with one another...and at the end of February, she approached me about writing two more grants for her. As a good boy that has learned something about being accountable...I took my mistakes from our work in January and owned them. I put timetables and structures into place so that Crazy wouldn't be made extra Crazy by having to rush to get things out of the door. Great. She, of course, owned nothing about her style or methods of operations that actually led to some of the crazy making of January. I should have seen this as a sign.
So, in the beginning of March it was full steam ahead. I literally spoke with Crazy every day for more than a week. It got to the point where it was ridiculous and unprofessional on her part. I was getting phone calls at 7pm and 8pm at night and on weekends. If she called and I did not call her back immediately, I would get emails from her and follow up phone calls that were borderline harassing. I sat on the phone with her for almost an hour trying to explain to her why a foundation I'd called declined to read a proposal from her organization (pretty clear...her program did not fit the funding criteria for that foundation...it took me an hour to get her to wrap her head around that). I did research for the woman on funders that would possibly be a better fit for her, and we decided to move forward with the two grant proposals.
I was working away on the proposals when on March 11th...about ten days in, I get an email from her to stop working on the proposal. I said sure that's fine. I also sent her an email saying that if she wanted me to complete the proposals that she would have to let me know at least two weeks before they were due AND that I would be billing her for the time I'd worked on March 22nd.
So, last week I billed her. Yesterday my roommate, who manages her fiscal relationship with her fiscal agent, tells me that when he called her to check on the invoice she basically said that I didn't produce any work and she didn't want to pay me. My darling roommate was up front with her saying...I've got the documentation of the work that he did, and I've got the documentation that shows that you asked him to stop working before he had a chance to complete any proposals. She said that she was going to go to her board and ask them about whether or not I should get paid.
God bless her. She's not from the U.S. and may not know how those of us from the ghetto get down...but Brandi don't play that.
So, last night, I sent her an email, copied her fiscal agent, and included all the documentation for the work that I'd done for her. I gave her until Friday to pay me, or Brandon is going down to the court house to file small claims papers. The last thing you want to do when you run a non-profit organization, especially a small non-profit organization that is trying to get a foothold in the funding community in the Twin Cities, is piss off a fundraiser with extensive community contacts. Vengeance is mine so sayeth the Lord...but in the ghetto we think that the Lord sometimes has enough to do and that now and again if we take some of the minor jobs off his shoulders...he doesn't mind.
Really, my conscience won't let me go as far as to call up funders and bitch this woman out. But, it sure doesn't limit me from taking her out at the knees in other ways. This is my livelihood. My bank account is right now negative and without this money by Friday there is a more than ok chance that I am going to lose the account. I did the work, and I deserve payment for it. And, a nut job with some serious mental health issues is not about to stand between me and eating. It's really that real.