We're not going to wait forever!

[Limescale]

I'm listing this under Sightings because the party involved isn't a customer but rather an artist who's work we were thinking of listing in our catalog. She did these lovely native ceremonial masks that we knew were going to be a big seller, as such when she came in to discuss terms and asked if we could possibly list them on our website as well we told her no problem. All we'd need was a biography of around two paragraphs detailing who she was and how she made the masks and we'd do her a proper feature. She says fine, she'll have it to us in the next couple of days...

...that was back in November. Come December we start contacting her trying to figure out what's up, and most of the time both of the numbers she gave us go straight to voicemail. Occasionally we got her on the phone for a minute or so and learned she's apparently also started undergoing treatments for cancer which have been leaving her unable to do much besides sleep. Okay, would've been nice to know that from the start but fair enough. We ask her to send us the biography when she has a chance.

Christmas comes and goes, as does New Years with no result. We contact her again several times, managing to reach her once to hear she apparently has finished the bio but lost our email addy, among reminders that she's a cancer patient and can't be on beck and call etc. etc. . We send the email her way and resume the waiting game. January draws to a close and she says she dropped it off at our warehouse....except when we ask who she left it with she gives a name that does not match anyone on our staff.

Finally my manager decides if she's honestly so sick from treatments that she can't even get us two paragraphs of text in a timely manner then she's probably too sick to make masks for us to sell, so he calls her up and tells her the deal is off.

Cue a sudden flurry of phone calls from both her and someone whom I guess is her husband, about how dare we have the audacity to keep bothering a poor dying woman and she's said several times she'll have the damn bio to us when she's feeling well enough to do so! We helpfully point out the above, and how we'd rather not put more pressure on her to regularly produce goods if she's in as bad a state as she says.

This prompts them both to try and bargain with us, the husband asking if he can dictate the bio to us over the phone, with the artist herself saying she'll personally come by to drop it off and let us go over it with her on Monday of the coming week at noon.

Well today is that Monday. We've got the conference room reserved, and both I and my manager sit down at noon awaiting her arrival.

12:10 comes and goes, but then traffic can be bad round this town so we decide to give her just a little more rope.

12:30

12:45

12:50

1:00

1:30

2:00. She's not coming. Manager tells me to go ahead and make the final call, telling her we're officially ending the business relationship.

I really have to wonder just what she was expecting to happen here. The masks she made were of excellent quality and we got a lot of interest when we started showing them off to clients. Could made this woman a mint if only she'd not kept us lingering on a stupid menial task.

[Shalom]

I was going to say, just put the stuff up without the bio, but then you (or your manager) pointed out that:

if she's honestly so sick from treatments that she can't even get us two paragraphs of text in a timely manner then she's probably too sick to make masks for us to sell.

It's a shame, but I think you may have dodged a bullet here. How many backorders is she likely to pile up, before deciding that she's too sick to work? And whose job is it going to be to inform the disappointed customers that they're not getting their masks, and returning their money (if you took orders in advance)?

[PepperElf]

about how dare we have the audacity to keep bothering a poor dying woman and she's said several times she'll have the damn bio to us when she's feeling well enough to do so!

So... if she's a "dying woman" when did he expect her to be able to find the time - or even the strength - to make any of the masks, let alone a small bio?

[Pixilated]

Assuming her story is even true, it would've been nice -- and professional -- of her to let you know that she could neither write the bio nor produce the masks for (say) the next six months but would contact you once she is well enough to resume working.

[eltf177]

I think you dodged a bullet here. If you offered these masks and she can't/won't deliver the damage to your company's reputation would be serious, possibly even fatal...

[Seshat]

Many people freak at the idea of writing something 'professional', even a two paragraph biography. It's also possible that she is semi-literate or illiterate. As I've mentioned before, some very intelligent people have poor literacy skills.

Of course, the professional way to handle either situation is to ask for help producing the bio - perhaps asking if she could produce the basic information, and someone from your company can turn it into paragraphs.

If you have a similar situation in the future, you may want to make that an offer up front. If they leap at the chance to have someone else do the actual writing, you've probably got a semi-literate on your hands.

... which means absolutely nothing with regard to the quality of their artwork, just their ability to produce written stuff.