What a Company Will Do – Stealing

I have written about the time I worked for this company before. I didn’t mention any names then, and I don’t plan on doing now. All I want to do is show people what can happen if you aren’t careful, and what people are willing to do to save a few pounds.

I discussed the lack of communication the company had last time. This time I want to present recent information I found out about them, regarding why suddenly we heard nothing from them and in turn never got paid.

The Background

I was in sixth form at school, about a year and a half ago now and my teacher put us in touch with a company to make their websites. Now, I am no expert at making websites, but I can do a simple one when I put my mind to it. This mad me not want to do it at the start, as a company website it a lot more work than just making one like this one. However, my name was already put down, not by me, but as I was the most knowledgeable they just did it. In the end I didn’t mind because I had a lot of fun until the end…

You can learn about the middle part in the article I wrote a while ago about it. There is no point putting all that in here again.

Anyway, when we got near the end, the product was finish and we were typing up the bill to give to them. We gave them the bill and they said they would send us the money to our accounts, which they had the information to. This is when the first problem occurred to us. They didn’t actually tell us what they were going to pay us, which led us to go up to them (we were in their building) and inquire if we were getting what we had written down. I think the price was about £2000, which may seem like a lot, but if they went to a proper web design company it would have probably be at least 10 times that.

They said they would look it over and maybe pay us a bit less, but still we had no clarification and we couldn’t give them the files until we knew what we were getting paid, luckily I never gave them the files…

What People Will Do

After about a week we were wondering if they were going to pay us, or even contact us about the websites. We hadn’t heard anything; our teacher hadn’t heard anything so it all seemed a bit weird. After a bit we were told that they were angry at us for demanding money! When really we were just asking what we were getting. It would have been idiotic to just give them out account numbers and accept anything they put in it. We weren’t demanding anything. We were asking for our payment. You don’t get anything for free.

That was that and we never heard anything again. The final thing we heard was that they were now going with another company. I emailed asking for a gesture of goodwill as we had spent many of hours learning how to make a website and then actually making the websites, but obviously, no response.

I couldn’t do anything else. We didn’t have a contract or anything. It all seems a bit naive of us now, but we were working for a company because out teacher was married to a board member, so it all seemed like it would be ok and we never expected them to be such ****s.

Eventually We Found Out

It must be 8 months since I last heard anything about the website or company. But I heard something the other day. One thing I didn’t mention was that one of my school mates in sixth form started to work for the company at the same time as we started doing the websites, well about a month in. She was in a sort of apprentice job and it was a great stepping stone for her to rise up through the company.

As soon as we heard nothing about the websites, she quit. She quit because of the website. Which at the time I thought was a bit weird, I understood that it would upset her, but at the end of the day it wasn’t like we were all great friends and giving up on this great career opportunity seemed a bit odd.

What I found out the other day though was that the company had asked her to get the files of us (steal them from us) give them to the IT people and upload it to their website, which meant they had a brand new spanking website for absolutely nothing. We didn’t have anything to say it was ours, so they would have been home and dry. I’m guessing they would have gone down the route that she made it, if we tried to go legal on them.

All in all, I’m not surprised after what they put us through. But it does teach us a lesson; people in business will do anything. I know this is a generalisation, but I’m not doing they will all not illegal things; I’m just saying watch out. There are those people out there who will screw you to build their empire.

Image: chanpipat / FreeDigitalPhotos.net