Employment Woes

I recently became employed, only for it to be taken away from me less than a day later.  I'm a freelance copyeditor, you see, with no physical job because the economy is just as bad in my area as it is in any area.  No one wants to hire a newbie in the fields you fit in, but no one wants to hire someone with a college degree in retail because they think you'll drop the job as soon as you find a better one.

Well anyway.  I was hired by Express Writers to be a copyeditor, mostly on the weekends and on-call in the afternoon.  It wouldn't have been a ton of money, but at the time, I thought it'd be a good credit on my resume to work at an actual content-creating company.  If I could stay with them long enough, I'd be able to say I had experience, and perhaps get that job at a publisher I'd love to have.

But it all went downhill.

The first warning was that the person tried to pay me outside of eLance.  It's against the site's guidelines to accept payment for a job on eLance outside, simply to protect the customer and to maintain records of the job.  She wanted to do it through PayPal, which I wouldn't have been able to accept anyway since my PayPal account is frozen and unusable because, you know, PayPal tends to hate its customers.  But in the end she decided to hire me and pay me through eLance, so I thought I'd be able to work with them and it was just a minor slip-up.

Then I was fired.  I was given one job, made a few minor mistakes (naming the file wrong when there weren't any guidelines for naming files), and was canned.  Apparently my biggest one came when I had to upload the file to the job within their work system and was unable to comment.  The system continually thought I didn't put anything into the text box even though I did, and I told this to the project coordinator and another editor, who said she was having trouble commenting as well.  Then the editor and coordinator go silent in the Skype chat, and the boss of the company IMs me to tell me I'm being fired for wasting their time and "spoke assertively to the staff to fix it" when I described the commenting troubles.

I did no such thing.  I described the problem exactly as it was and at one point said "hopefully it fixes itself or you can figure out the problem so I don't have to keep sending you stuff for jobs over Skype."  She didn't even let me defend myself or explain my point of view, she just removed me from Skype.  Rude, right?

Well I was pretty peeved, but I felt better after finding this article on Ripoff Report.  Even if it is a few years old, that's probably just the tip of the iceberg for how she treats her customers.  I'd rather be fired by a scam artist than have to explain away her actions time and time again.

So watch out for Express Writers, is what I'm trying to say.  They're a nightmare to work for and, apparently, with.