Why I Quit a Freelance Job After 4 Days
It’s not always about the money
Yesterday I submitted my resignation to a freelance job I only started working at four days ago. Yes, I only gave the company four days until they really messed up. The bad thing is I asked them to clarify something early on and they still couldn’t get that right.
The company could have had a decent writer working for them but their writing requirements and the time they wasted gave me a bad taste in my mouth. Personally, this wasn’t the company I wanted to work for the low pay they offered.
Basically, you want to work for a company that has good rules in place and they treat their employees well. With many things going digital these days, my experience with them was email and to review the online documents they provided. Somehow they really missed the mark in my first assignment.
So to avoid any further aggravation, I sent them a short I quit email four days after starting this job. I can’t remember quitting a job this fast before, so this is a record for me.
My moonlighting job
I found a writing job on a job hunters website and applied. The requirements were to be knowledgeable in finances. I figured this wouldn’t be too hard. Within a few days, I was hired.
The company worked for top marketing agencies so I figured even though the pay was so so, I would be able to write on my resume that I worked for ABC marketing company. Trading money for working for a known company was how I was going to get my name out there.
Wasted 3 hours of my time
On Thursday, I started researching information and figuring out the format the company wanted the article. The marketing agency who wanted the article was looking for information about buying real estate in the Phoenix, Arizona market but not to appear like a sales article.
Given the information and example provided, I put some information together. I continued to refine what I had and finished it the next day. I figured they would send the article back with a few corrections for me to make so I was ready for it.
On Monday I got an email that said I missed the mark. The editor said the article was a sales-type article and that I didn’t cover what they wanted. Thinking to myself, I used the examples they provided and referenced the real estate broker, the millennial generation, and some references I included. I was mad but also irritated.
The pay just wasn’t worth it
I thought hard if I should try again but didn’t want to go through any more aggravation. To avoid working for practically nothing, I sent a quick I resign email.
Thinking to myself again, I said if they can mess up this bad on my first assignment, they must have a lot of problems in their company. I didn’t want to deal with this and especially not for $20 or $.05 a word. My first assignment was writing a 400-word article.
The company didn’t know what they were doing
Later that day, a manager emailed me to reconsider. She said the wrong example was uploaded and the manager sent me the correct example to follow. I didn’t respond because I had already submitted my resignation email and wasn’t changing my mind.
I’m not sure how the company is structured but to upload the wrong material for me to follow was a huge warning sign. A well- run company should have good systems in place. If the company sent me the wrong assignment on day one, there is no telling how much they would mess up again in the future.
To save the company and me any more issues, I just left the company. They weren’t worth my time.
Time is one thing you use and can never get back.
This also started to give me bad memories of my last freelancing job. I ended up wasting a lot of time rewriting information and recorrecting what the editor suggested. I didn’t want to go through this a second time.
Reminded me of my last freelancing job
Since I worked for a freelance company before, I didn’t want a repeat of the same thing. I lost so much time in that last freelancing job. My past experience gave me some clues early on so I knew when to quit without going through all that pain again.
- A company should have a strict set of rules for their writers to follow. This company fell far short of that.
- Finding the guide to follow was hard to find when I started. I had to search in the back office of their website clicking on different sections until I found it. If a company has to tell me where to find the guide, then they haven’t made their site user friendly for their new writers. A company needs to spend the time to make their website user friendly even if the writers are temporary hires.
- The company made a big mistake on my very first assignment. What they had to do was upload the correct document for me to follow, but they uploaded the wrong form or the wrong version. This may seem minor but for a company such as this, they should have their act together.
- If my submission was incorrect and off-target, the reviewer should have looked at what information I used from their website. If the reviewer would have looked, they would have found the wrong document was uploaded.
I’m glad this is over and now off to another find another writing project. Have you had a bad experience working for a company?
Tom Handy is a top Writing, Finance, Investment, and Bitcoin writer on Medium, and the father of two kids. He retired from the Army and sits on several non-profit boards. You can find him on Twitter @tomhandy1.
