Robert,I'll let you keep this particular headache, thank you very much. I have enough of my own!!
Just for your information, I have had a few similar experiences and, interestingly enough, two of them also involved work on church hymnals. In both cases, my contact people had no experience with either music or computers and were under the impression that all I had to do to effect their changes was to push a button somewhere and like magic, everything would automatically be set according to their wishes.
On one of the jobs, I was even given a copy of a hymn and told to make the ones I engraved look just like it. I did and he changed his mind AFTER I sent him the files. At that point, he not only refused to pay for the additional time I would need to make the changes, but refused to pay for the files I had sent him containing the work I had already done. I assume he sent them out to some hack to rework for little or no payment.
I should mention that these types of experiences are by no means limited to church work and most of my experiences with clients have been quite satisfactory and I have a fairly large base of repeat customers.
However, I have since solved this problem by asking my clients (and myself) to sign a contract that lays out, in EXTREME detail what is expected of both of us. This has caused me to lose a few jobs, but I figured that those were jobs I probably did not want anyway. My repeat clients have not balked at the contracts, so I guess it has really helped to eliminate some of those bad jobs.
Good luck and keep me posted.
Jim Coull
