Suspend Until Payment

[geniusintraining]

I'm not doing the accounting department's dirty work. I'd rather hand in my notice and go home to a good night's sleep.

I think you would think different if you could not sleep at night and it was your company... better yet, try telling your wife no paycheck this week or the next 3 then I think you would have a different view

 

[realolman]

good night's sleep may be hard to come by with no job.

 

[ASF]

Well yes, different if you ARE the accounts department. In that case you're already knee deep in the proverbial, and I'm sure I'd have a different opinion! But fortunately for our OP, I don't think he's in this situation.

And yes, it might be hard to get a good night's sleep with no job, but it'd be even harder with no job and a black mark against your name which meant you were never going to get another one...

 

[osmanmom]

must have a good sleep at night,

Wake up on morning

Be a man facing/solve problem challenge.

 

[goghie]

Guys, it is perfectly legal if customer is previously informed about consequences if bill is not payed. It has to be written in offer and in contract, and it has to be done in safe manner.
Just to add that Modicon has specialized command for that on Unity processors (Halt command).

 

[padees]

Only done it once. Basically, run was disabled after the 60th power cycle. So, after power up, no go. Yes, they power down the entire factory at the end of the day.

This was one of those jobs where their maintenance guy toasted everything in the first place and somehow saved a program from another machine over the only known copy they had for this machine.

Another local guy converted this from Modicon to A-B with a ML1500 a few years earlier. He was no help because he never got paid either.

Only documentation we had was a partially printed copy of the old Modicon program. Well, this other guy kinda rearranged the I/O and a couple things were removed from the machine as well.

Basically starting from scratch, had to map the I/O. Had to talk to operators on how this machine is supposed to work. Maintenance guy had no clue.

It only took a couple weeks to get it going and it ran better producing more brake lines per shift. They were happy. Only problem I had with this is the cheesy mechanical's in a few areas and had to program around this. By the way, I'm a ME and have designed and built a couple hundred machines and automated systems.

Anyway, they are happy and all is well. Accounting sends out notices of past due invoices with no response. Makes calls and the person is always busy or not in.

Power-up cycle 61 is getting close, then passes. A couple weeks go buy from that and boss asked me if I forgot to put that in. Showed him the program and gave him password, which is just our fax number a tad scrambled. Told him if they hit that power cycle, it won't run. Then he asked, is it possible someone got in and uploaded the program before you put the password in? Said it's possible, but wouldn't do them any good.

Well, two months has passed since this shut down. Boss gets a really nasty email from the guy who won't pay his bills. A few more emails back and forth and everything get's forwarded to our lawyers. We sued, they paid!!!

What they tried to do after the shut down is hire a friend of a friend that was unemployed who supposedly knew something about this stuff. After two months, he was still banging his head against the wall.

When the check cleared, they were given the entire package with an unprotected copy of the program. The shut down stuff was removed.

Our contract basically stated that this is OUR Property, and when all payments are made, they become the owner.

This is 100% legal and we don't have to tell them anything more.

Ever hear of a proprietary notice? I personally know a PE that a judge banned from working in his field for 5 years and also got a 40K fine for screwing up.

Ever hear of intellectual property? Well, I think you get the idea.

 

[rootboy]

Why can a customer s**t in a vendors lap, but the vendor can't s**t in the customers lap?

Believe me, it goes both ways.

I've been on both sides of the equation, and I get my share of vendors dumping on me. Not all of them, but enough that I spend a good portion of my time getting them to comply.

And it's all well and good to say "Hold them to the spec", but there are a few bad apples out there who never intended to comply to the spec. And the truly slick players have friends at headquarters who have been known to come down on me when I complain. Not that it does any good...


A few examples:

We contracted the services of a drives company who charged $220/hour, and the guy shows up and starts correcting his prints. I told him that this wasn't what we were paying him for (after all, fixing the prints is on them), but he just told me that this was the way it was going to be.

Then there was that time a balancer company sent their tech out to the plant, but he never showed up. Come to find out, his son was stationed at a post close by so he simply took the rental car that we were paying for and headed down to see him. Calling up his office got him turned back around...

Probably the most egregious was a process company who designed the heads for our brake fill equipment. They didn't work well, so our Maintenance guys designed their own heads, built them, and drew up the prints for them. The company got hold of the prints and used a direct copy of them for a competitor's machine. Our guys caught them when they were at the company for some unrelated business and saw our prints laying out *still with our name on them* as part of the build set for the competitor's equipment.


Now the other side of the coin...

As a contractor, I have been forced to fix programming for unrelated processes, just because it resided in our PLC. That wasn't so bad, one of our guys was forced to work on a completely unrelated piece of equipment, including supplying parts for it!

And a somewhat typical ploy is the "junior engineer" who tells you that he has a field order, so go ahead and do the work. When it comes time to settle up, the senior engineer makes a show of chewing him out and claims that he only had the authority to sign off on $1500 of work (this happened to us in Canada).