Business horror stories

[alternativerage]

Does anyone have any business horror stories? I want to hear them for a collection I'm putting together. I'll give you full credit for it once it's published. Just let me know what you have!

[10 Yetis]

Two words, "None Paying Customers" :D

Specifically, midhost-design (now gone bust), a specialist design company to the car recovery industry. We were a very young company at the time and it was a good few years ago and to be honest I was very naive.

We got scammed big... did a few small rush jobs for them, they paid fine... then they had another large rush job and we had no time to ask for usual deposit as we were acting as outsource for them to service RAC work they had won.

We did it, they buggered off, they then went bust and we had nothing. Spoke to RAC, they were very nice about it, but cos we had no contract or anything they politely told us to eff off.

Taught me a very harsh lesson as bigs sums (to us) were involved. :D

All thanks to Simon O'connor at Midhost-designs. :D

[Coding Monkey]

6 month long project. Everything was stored on a server, which I wanted to move from America to England, so I enquired about doing this with the host. They responded telling me that due to my request, they had shut the server off. And they did. And they formatted everything. The last back-up I did, the FTP software (which didn't alert me to this) only backed up under half the entire source code, which was 10's of thousands of lines long.

UK servers, back-ups on 2 server HDs, 2 internal HDs and 1 external as of now.

[creacom]

Well its not so much a horror story now but at the time it made my blood boil for weeks !!! :( We had a stand at an exhibition last year. During the day we had my laptop on the stand, flicking through our portfolio.

A man called "James" started chatting to us for 25mins and was really interested in rebranding his IT company. Other people approached the stand and James stood to the side and said he was going to look through our portfolio and at the laptop because he was going to buy one.

10mins later he was gone BUT the laptop was still there.

3 weeks later I opened up a regional newspaper and saw an advert that we had been working on, exact same design, style, image AND tagline ! Really strange, but how could anyone know about our concept ? It was being used in this newspaper to promote the services of an advertising company in Glasgow who were trying to break into the Highland market.

I Googled them and found a photo of two of the directors....one of them was "James" our friend from the exhibition.

To cut a long story...a bit shorter... he must have transfered some files called "AutumnAd_concepts" onto his USB key when looking at our computer. I had stupidly left them in the HD. 3 weeks later the same company used something very similar to another of our designs that was in the same file for a follow up advert.

What did I do ???

I called him and asked him about it. He claimed that he wasnt even at the conference ! A quick look through the delegate and attendance list showed that he was. When challenged again, he claimed it must have been a coincidence !

Over the following 3 months, "James" had to buy 12 new expensive tyres for his BMW. :wink: