Whilst I was away my email application failed nearly totally. Despite my confidence it made a horrible mess of its maiden use. Underwired have basically fired me, insensed that they had nothing and that I was out of reach.

I’m deeply upset and confused. I had tested it and I felt it to be stable. I have no idea what went wrong. My access has been removed and I am unable to do a diagnosis. Whilst I was away they found somebody else to work on the system. I’m not sure whether I’m surplus to requirements anymore or if they will ask that it is completed now.

They have paid me two thirds of the contract price. This is in one sense generous as they have no functionality, but in another it is fair as they have kept all the code I wrote.

This is the second major failure of my freelance career. The first being when I agreed to restyle a government agency site of 5,000+ pages in two weeks. I believed I could do almost all the work with a Perl program. This was not the case and after about two months I gave up. The common mistake between that project and this was a gross misestimate of the time required resulting in a loss of faith by my clients.

The first failure was worse as I put a lot of work in and so did many of close friends and they and I got nothing at all. However, this time I feel worse as UW are close friends and at this point it looks like that relationship is completely finished, ending in the worst possible way with me letting them down and them not wanting to try again. I would like to make good, but I’m not sure they will give me the chance and my confidence in my ability to do what’s needed is shot to pieces.

The worse thing is that it was really outside my control. I put everything I had into the system and my holiday had been booked since last year. I genuinely felt that it was ready to go when I left and now it seems I couldn’t have been more wrong. Underwired didn’t tell me that they’d got somebody else to work on it. If they had they would have ruined my holiday, but I would have done everything I could of from New York to fix it for them.