I was wondering what phone call to make and to whom and then I decided I would just talk to you, my online family, what’s left of it, and certainly as much or more of a family than I have ever known in so called “real life.”
I am just beaten to a pulp right now. I am fried. I am frazzled. This has been going on for some time. What is the matter you ask? Facebook, I answer. Facebook is killing me. Facebook is the linchpin to this blog being mega successful or merely putting down the road, a choo choo choo a choo choo choo, the Little Political Blog That Could. Of course we can, of course we can, we just need a little help from our friends — and our friends are the people out there who we haven’t met yet.
You’ve perhaps heard the expression that “strangers are only friends you haven’t met yet?” Zoomers are only connoisseurs of political writing that haven’t yet found PolitiZoom. That is gospel truth.
When this blog gets its voice amplified, we get well received. We are a good product here. We just need to get this product in front of more faces and to do that we need Facebook. Twitter is under control. As a matter of fact, just today on Twitter one of our pieces got amplified by Patriot Takes, who is a player there. These things help.
A few months ago we had the honor of Jill Wine-Banks, one of the Watergate attorneys whom you know from MSNBC, kindly saying, “This is a headline I wish I had written,” with respect to Kevin McCarthy having to explain Trump’s three-hour gap just as the Watergate folks (fifty years ago this summer!) had to explain Nixon’s 18-minute gap.
So Twitter is fine. We’ll do okay there. But Facebook is the big, digital goliath and we are not doing so great there. Not a tall a tall.
I’m not going to bore you with detail but let me just say this: I am a dolphin among barracuda and a barracuda amongst sharks. The waters of cyberspace are dark and treacherous and there are pirates like you cannot believe.
I have been lied to about 1) what it takes to get rolling on Facebook and 2) I have been insulted. The people doing the lying and insulting are people who hold themselves forward on the internet as being “social media experts” who will make all your dreams come true. I am too exhausted and depressed to laugh.
Here is a sample of the latter — the insulting ones — for your amusement. This all came to a head in the past week and this is from last night. Purple text for “perpetrator” — makes sense right? The black text is me, and you’ll recognize my voice anyhow.
It starts out on a cheery note, with a young guy in woman-hating Pakistan calling me ‘Grandma” and making an editorial comment about my work here — and a Facebook posting problem I won’t bore you with.
I think you write shit, that’s why they’re not allowing you to post
You think Facebook has decided that my work is shit? ? ?
You owe me $20 but you never paid. Poor grandma
Poor grandma? Now you’re making a crack about my age? I’m reporting you for this tomorrow. This was not a smooth move on your part.
And I will report you on Upwork for getting free work and not paying single penny
I know I miscalculated my hourly rate here on Upwork but you should have simply asked me [sic] that you’re not going to pay $60 . Just pay $20 and that’s it case closed. Why you didn’t do this? Why you created the whole drama?
By all means, report me. The problem you will find is two fold: 1) the powers that be at UpWork have already read this thread, per my request; 2) you didn’t get a contract set up. That’s on you. I offered to do whatever you needed. That’s in the thread. This is YOUR EFF UP, buddy boy, not mine.
I didn’t “create a drama.” I called you on the grotesque FRAUD you were perpetrating.
I will do payroll this week and pay all my vendors and all my employees. It’s not a big company and God knows I’m not rich, but I get by. We all do okay. We get to monetize our passion to write and talk to other Democrats, in any event.
But if you want to believe that I’ve had a business on the internet for several years now, yet am too poor to afford to pay a vendor $20, believe what you want. I’ll tell you one thing, you are a great advertisement to NOT deal with Up Work and to go to the more expensive companies, because it really is true, you get what you pay for.
My point is that you never mentioned my 3 hours, you talked about your 3 hours everytime. I teached you the whole stuff sitting on the other end. Its not easy to teach lady who is in this age. I could have get frustrated easily when you were unable to find that share screen button even it was right in front of you. I didn’t get mad at you but tried every technique just to solve your issue . I deserve my payment for that
You should have shown some respect to my services
Oh, it’s not easy to teach an old fool like me? Is that what you’re saying? Keep going. This can turn into an age discrimination law suit. How do you think the people at AARP are going to react when I tell them i was treated this way? They maintain a data base on elder abuse, FYI.
Again, and for the LAST TIME: We were NOT on a shared screen, we were on a shared presentation screen and there was no presentation to be shared. A shared screen is when two people are able to maneuver on the same screen and I wanted to do that on Facebook. You didn’t know how. That’s what happened. Not that I’m some old fool who can’t follow directions. I write 1,500 to 2,500 words per day of original copy, plus I run a business. Good luck convincing anybody that I’m brain dead. But it is amusing. ? ?
I’m not doing any age discrimination but you admitted that day that you know nothing what’s going on and how to cope with it. You also said this technology stuff is way far from you. And you also told me not get mad because you know nothing about technology
Admit one more thing that you’re poor and that’s why you didn’t pay me. That’s all
If I knew how to do this process and if I loved technology, I’d be doing your job, not mine. I’m a writer and a businessperson. I could give jack shit about technology. I hire it done. I’m not going to “admit I’m poor” because that’s not true. I didn’t pay you because you revealed yourself to be 1) a liar, 2) incompetent 3) a con artist.
Yeah that’s a lame excuse not to pay.
You got mad because you don’t wanna pay and love free work
Those are lame excuses not to pay? ? ? Oh, my God, if I didn’t see it in front of my eyes, I wouldn’t believe it. So fraud is a lame excuse not to pay. Oh, man. Unbelievable.
So do you — just out of curiosity — pay people who lie to you and cheat you without hesitation?
That’s a ninja technique btw, get your work done and get mad at others so you don’t have to pay. ??
l’d have paid you one hour’s work, which is $3.00. I probably would have paid you the $20, but in no world was I going to pay you the $60. When I told you that, you were shocked and dismayed because you thought you had a real idiot on the line, an old fool who didn’t know anything — as you have said above. These are the facts of what went down. You don’t deserve anything on these facts. In a perfect world, which we do not live in, you would get canned from this platform.
Here is what happened: 1) You didn’t know the difference between a SHARED SCREEN and shared presentation. 2) We could have used a shared screen to great effect. 3) A shared presentation screen was utterly useless, because THERE WAS NO PRESENTATION TO SHARE. You came up with that waste of time either to deliberately waste time or because you didn’t know the difference. So we wasted two and a half hours on that. In the last half hour we actually got some work done — but I HAD TO DO IT MYSELF because you were not here in the Pacific Time Zone as you lie that you are. So EYE had to do the work with Facebook. All you did for me was give me three sentences of instruction. And I would have happily paid you for the three sentences, And I woud from this platform for pulling this kind of a stunt. But go ahead and have UpWork do a claim and what I’ve posted here is EXACTLY what I will explain to them.
And finally, I DID NOT get my work done. I’m STILL waiting to hear from Facebook. So you did NOTHING for me. I have ZERO RESULT as we speak and if/when I get a result it will be due to my own efforts and not anything that you have done for me. Are we clear about this?
Get a life grandma, you deserve oscar for your drama and bunch of lies you just told.
Pooor and freebie
There you go with the ugly ageism crack. Would you like it if I made racist cracks about you, and called you a third world camel jockey, or ugliness to that effect? Because that’s what you’re doing here.
There isn’t a single lie in what I said. YOU can’t handle the truth. The truth is that you thought you had a fool you could take for a ride. You didn’t deliver what you said you would do. I said we should share a screen and go fill out the Facebook form together. Fifteen minutes work max. You didn’t know what you were doing.
Ain’t you a grandma?
No. I don’t have any grandchildren.
It took 3 hours just to teach you otherwise i could have done it in less than a minute
You took 3 hours to understand and now blaming me? How can you justify that?
To teach me WHAT??? You taught me NOTHING!!! I ended up filling out the forms myself because you couldn’t because you’re in Pakistan and not in the Pacific Time Zone. I would have LOVED IT if you would have just taken care of business. That’s what I wanted. You couldn’t because you didn’t know how.
There was no “three hours to understand.” I ABANDONED the shared screen crap after three hours because I had no more time.
You just keep telling lies so that you don’t have to pay. I will not ask you for money but do me a favor and say you like free work and love not to pay
Show me ONE lie here. Just one. There was no free work. You wasted my time playing with that stupid screen which was useless. The only work that was of a benefit to me is when I filled out the Facebook paperwork and I had to do it myself. So getting you involved was time consuming and useless. But you wanted to be paid for 20 hours worth of work at $3.00 per hour — yet I’m the one who’s the bad person here. What a world view you have. Good luck living with it.
I’m done for the evening. I work for a living so I don’t have time to bicker endlessly. You want to present a claim to Up Work, go right ahead. I will tell them everything that I’ve told you here. The problem you have, Sir, is that you can’t admit you’re a scam artist and you need to make the client the bad guy — or “Bad Grandma” in this case.
I suggest you drop the ageism bit. That is a perfectly ugly thing, hating old people, and it really will not get you far in life. As a matter of fact, you will be amazed how badly it will screw you up if you persist in it. My age is not the problem here. There is no cognitive impairment on my part here. You’re a cheap little hoodlum, that’s the issue. You live with it and deal with it, because I’m done.
So friends, this is a slice of life in the day of the blogger. I didn’t make a word of this up. If I could write dialogue like this, I’d be putting Hollywood on its ass. And I’m not.
This is the level of creep that you deal with at a place called Up Work and it is several steps above another shit hole called Fiverr. If you were here last year when the site was crashing all the time, that’s when we were attempting to work with Fiverr. Another loser we left behind in the dust was Bluehost, the Hosting Provider From Hell.
I am exhausted. I am completely out of it. Multiply this episode by ten or fifteen or fifty and you get what I deal with in order to attempt to first of all, keep this site on the internet and secondly, grow it. And this is in addition to writing and managing.
And the gnats? They’re having a field day in this house. I just bagged up in trash bags the watermelon rinds, that sort of thing, but I was a bit slow the last week or so because of this distraction and now the gnats are practically flying formation from the kitchen to the living room.
The weather has just turned hot in the Mojave desert, and even inside with air conditioning, the gnats know. The gnats know.
And you wanna know what? The gnats are smarter than the emm effers on these freelance tech websites! Hand to God, that’s a fact! I’m going to fix a margarita and then interview a few of the gnats. I may have my Facebook team right here in the apartment, flying around, as we speak.
I wonder how many thousands of them are needed to jump on the keys of the keyboard and push down a key? Or, they can just tell me what buttons to push. A few more encounters like the one I described above, and I’ll be ready to take orders from a gnat, trust me. That’s the direction we’re going here.
May Meta Jesus, the Deity of Cyberspace take pity on me. Please, Meta Jesus. Please. I promise I’ll be good.
A little note from someone who has been doing his business through Upwork for several years now: I wish I could say that your story was typical. But sadly that is very much inline with regular horror stories I hear from virtually ALL my clients. Freelance writers of that woefully low caliber of professionalism is regrettably the norm in my game.
My mom has this theory that because such folk don’t see this as a “real job”, they get sloppy and more than a little careless. Maybe there’s something to that. Regardless, there’s no faster way to flush your rep (AKA the only thing that will keep you employed over the long haul) than to act like this little twerp. They give my profession a bad name and so earn my ire for such foolishness. I fully expect that, unless some fringe political outfit finds them useful (thus disqualifying them from legit employment forever after), they’ll be lucky to make it a year and a half longer. Better off without them.
I’m not following you, Bareshark. You are saying that there are freelance WRITERS at UpWork? I’ll take your work for it. I only know about freelancer techies. You’re saying the writers are flakes, too?
Answer 1: yes and it’s been my central pipeline to work for nearly a decade now. Answer 2: such is the impression my clients repeatedly give me. Going by your account, Ursula, the same lack of professionalism and seriousness infects other parts of the Upwork labor pool.
Will you email me at [email protected]? I want to discuss this more with you. Thx
They probably are fruit flies, rather than gnats. I”ve had my experiences with them, too.
The timing is just perfect, the technical stuff going off the walls and the fruit flies.
Miller moths occurred to me. (We are supposed to be in full season, but frankly, I have only seen one.)
What is a miller moth? is that those giant ones?
fruit flies are crazy little suckers, fill a jar or bowl with apple cider vinegar, drop a bit of fruit in there, just a bit, they will fly into the jar and drown. takes a bit of time but well worth it.
I am not oblivious to the statement it makes about me that I’ve got fruit flies. It also is quite poetic because I deal with fruit flies on the internet and now I literally have them in my space as well. I think they call that “resonance.”
And right after this conversation, he probably got on another call to “help” someone remove non-existent viruses from their PC (aka steal their bank info and drain their savings).
It’s going to be interesting to see how Up Work resolves this. They haven’t gotten back to me yet. The fact that it’s taking so long is a statement in and of itself, that they’re not finding this easy to deal with. I think this young punk is crazy. I would NEVER in a million years have attacked an older client like this when I was his age. But I guess times have changed, right?