Complaint about Lisa Peterson

This is a complaint I had from years ago, but just in case someone else wants to hire her, they can see what I went through.

I’m taking this complaint from an old site, and putting it on here.

Well, I made a HUGE mistake with this desktop publisher.

I hired Lisa Peterson back in September of 2005 from Elance to redesign my e-book with InDesign and she was supposed to also know Quark.

I should have known she Lisa Peterson fishy because before I even spoke to her on the phone, she was already trying to get me to hire her to do future work instead of concentrating on the matter at hand, which was to redesign this one e-book.

She even started trying to sell me on web design services when I’m not even sure the site she gave me http://www.6sense.net/web/index.html does web design services. Her URL is no longer working.

It sounded like she farms out the work and she was just trying to get work for her friends or people she knows.

It was my fault for hiring her, I admit it. She was a basketcase on the phone and that was my second clue, but her price was right and I felt her samples were good enough, so I hoped it was just her artistic side that I would have to deal with.

I paid her 50% down, $600 and I told her I had hired an editor to go through the entire manual and as the files were finished by the editor, I would send them to her.

She never once said this was an issue.

I told her in the meantime she could start working on the covers of the larger text files and create a general layout for the template.

She sent me some covers with a few different fonts, but misspelled one word.

I didn’t like some of the photos or some of the letters of the font she picked, so I spent hours going through photos and fonts to show her which ones I liked better because I didn’t feel she was getting it.

After I sent her all of the work I had done with me researching photos and fonts, she never ended up showing me any more samples with my suggestions.

She did send one general layout for the template which was ok.

Then she started saying that she didn’t want to work on anything until she had ALL the files and by this time I had already started sending her each file one at a time as I was receiving them from the editor.

I told Lisa that we didn’t agree to wait until she received all the files, but she was claiming it would be faster for her to do it all in one shot.

While this maybe made sense on one hand, there was no way I was waiting that long to get any work back from her because I knew it was going to be another several weeks before the editor was completely done.

I’d have to review Lisa’s work and the one month time line would then have stretched into 3-4 months.

I started having other problems with her even before she came up with this request.

One week she claimed her e-mail server was down and never gave me, the customer, any alternate way to contact her, so e-mails were not returned. I guess it’s very difficult to get a backup e-mail in place.

She missed several days because she was sick. That didn’t concern me at the time and I can’t fault someone for getting sick, but I didn’t know Lisa Peterson well enough to know if she used this excuse often.

Then there were a couple of times I’d call her and she would never call me back when I wanted to speak to her on the phone. She also IMed me before I hired her and the minute I hired her, she never came online so I could IM with her in real time.

After I complained that we didn’t agree on her waiting until she had all the files, she told me that if I wasn’t happy, we could terminate the contract.

Also in the contract she had created herself, she stated she would keep me up-to-date daily, but she never did.

After trying to get in touch with her one last time to see if we could salvage the relationship, I finally had to accept the fact that Lisa Peterson was irresponsible and it was clear she didn’t care about doing the work.

So I spoke to Elance saying I wanted my money back and I wrote to her asking her to put the money back into her Elance account. After I evaluated what I had received from her, I had nothing. Everything she sent me was in PDF format, so nothing could be edited by the next desktop publisher, and even though I asked her to correct the covers I did like, she never did. So all of this was useless because of her spelling mistakes.

She actually did create 2 forms out of the numerous ones I gave her that she never even touched, and she made mistakes on those too.

She copied text from one file into another different file because she assumed they were exactly the same when they weren’t, so they were useless too.

She then started telling Elance she wanted $200 for all the work she had done and I said no way. Elance said they couldn’t handle this problem anymore and directed me to Square Trade a mediation company.

I submitted my claim to them and guess what, never heard from them and they have no phone number on their site and there’s no way to e-mail them.

My understanding was that if they don’t get a response from Lisa Peterson, I will never hear back from anyone.

So, in the end, she got the entire $600 for doing no complete work I can use, and now I’m fighting with Elance through my credit card company to get my money back.

They are saying they aren’t responsible for the money once it’s been handed over to the contractor, so in affect, they allow these contractors to rip people off since they get the 50% deposit. And while this is common practice, what happens when they don’t do the work?

Fast forward years late Elance must have learned their lesson and started holding the money in escrow until the work is done, but this Lisa Peterson got away with scamming me and Elance.

Elance is no longer in business. oDesk bought them out a few years ago.