This much I’d say.
In the past 10 years I have had many contractors give quotes. If they say they’re coming at time x, they typically come at most half an hour late. Or call in to say they can’t come.
Similarly whenever I make an appointment to quote people things, I show up. Who cares about whether they’ve paid me? I show up because this is the correct way to do business. If I’m not showing up for whatever reason, I always inform them in advance. It’s courtesy.
This is how you do things in real life. That’s how you make people treat you seriously, so they don’t dismiss you for your looks or whatever reason. So that even if a business proposal fails, both sides retain mutual respect. I’ve referred contractors whom I didn’t do business with, and I’ve been referred by people whom I didn’t do business for.
I’ve never gotten angry at someone not showing up, because I’ve never been stood up before with no notice. Maybe 1/3 of all ‘quote’ appointments are not met, but they are ALWAYS postponed or cancelled with courteous communication rather than just ignored.
That guy whom I’m mad at, I’d traded several messages and discussions over draft files which he’d already read. He asked for several days to finish a past project, then wrote to me and said he was free to devote serious time for this project and asked for the final files. I handed him the final files with the clearly communicated expectations that I expected an offer asap. It’s not a one line ‘send me your files and I get back to you’ thing that you do during the initial communication. He’d invested some time earlier already, that’s why I was willing to wait. It would not have been right to be talking to other sellers in this context.
He could easily have written back saying: “something’s cropped up, I can’t work on this till next week”. Instead he ‘took a vacation’ and disappeared.
The notion that you can just ignore people seems to be a very internet thing.
In the past few months, I’ve made appointments with a certain online company that was supposed to give me an online demo of their booking software. These guys MISSED their appointment THREE times. Because I was quite interested in their offerings (and when I’m sitting at the computer I can do other things anyway), I merely rescheduled. I did this over the phone three time with the manager, so not as if I was rescheduling to a website that no tech person is looking at.
After the third time, I decided they are not serious businessmen or organized people capable of using their own booking software. And then they had the guts to contact me again with a form email touting their software. I was incensed and wrote a nasty email back demanding that they never contact me again. Their idiot manager (same guy who made the phone calls 3x) wrote back to me within an hour. WTH?? I instantly trashed his email so I don’t know what he said. When you get to the point where you trash a mail without looking at it, it means the writer has so little credibility and respect from you that you just don’t care.
So yeah, I’ll never do business again with that fiverr guy who wasted my time. Even if I can’t give him a negative review, he already has a negative review from me inside.
