You did nothing - why such a big bill?

I thought of that joke the minute I started reading the OP, it's a classic for our industry.

It occurs to me that some of the actions / inactions of "the man" suggests that he was treated the same way at one point and has found a way to manipulate them into paying him.

I had a "customer" once who screwed me on the 10% retention of a project because I "missed the deadline", even though I missed it because he insisted on supplying the parts and bought a SLC500 off of FleaBay that didn't work, which I didn't know until I went to load the program. He insisted on dealing with getting a replacement too, again from the same crappy FleaBay seller, and by the time all the dust settled, I had 1 day left to commission the system. Couldn't make it happen, there were too many other bugs with I/O wiring and bad parts (all from FleaBay). So he shorted me $1K, saying that I should have done 100% testing of HIS incoming parts as they arrived... even though nothing of the sort was stipulated in the contract.

Fast forward 2 years, he calls me for another project; rush rush emergency shutdown on a similar machine. I quoted him $16k for this one and only if I supply the PLC; he balked, but I knew that he must have called everyone else in town before calling me and I was right, he said OK. I then insisted he put 10% cash up front for me to start. He balked again but he did and at the end of the project when I sent him the invoice, I showed the $1,000 retention of the previous project as a line item within the $16k bill, just so he knew I had not forgotten. I know we rarely get that chance for a do-over, but I couldn't pass it up. He never called me again, but I heard from other guys in town that nobody wanted to do any work for him and everyone over charged him.

What goes around comes around.
 
Ronnie,
Don't waste any energy harboring ill-will toward this client. We all know there are many of these frugal clients out there that don't understand value and worth. This isn't your ideal customer anyways. This isn't in anyway a customer you'd want a long term relationship with, so just move on. If you were to modify your invoice in a way to increase the probability you might actually get paid for this effort, perhaps ditch the day rate and revise it to show the actual hours worked, my 2cents (yankee here).

In any event, barring they change their perspective, just hope you don't hear from them for another 7 years.
 
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Reminds me a lot of this exchange between my favourite smart-arse Aussie and his colleague.

When they say "it only took you a few hours", the response should quite rightly be "it only took me a few hours and 20+ years experience. How much of that 20 years would you like me to charge you?"
 

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